A Roman show of strength

For sheer tonnage, it's the biggest show Seattle Art Museum has ever squeezed through its doors. For prestige, you can't beat its ancestry. "Roman Art from the Louvre" — a traveling show of some 180 objects from the legendary Paris museum — will open Thursday at Seattle Art Museum and fill the new 14,000-square-foot Special Exhibitions gallery with 50 tons of monumental statues, marble reliefs, gold jewelry, fabulous silver, tile mosaics and various status symbols of ancient Rome. Naturally, all that heft and grandeur comes with a price, both to the museum and its visitors.

The exhibition traces the period from the late first century B.C. to the 4th A.D, a momentous era that's been the stuff of countless plays, movies and TV docudramas. In fact, you may want to dust off those old "I, Claudius" videos and a good history book in order to fully appreciate the portraits of emperors, including a look at the famous succession of the first dynasty: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. As you might expect, "Roman Art" is about power and glory — but it also touches on the intricate social order of slaves, soldiers and citizens who propped up those at the helm.

This show is a novelty for Seattle Art Museum, whose own collection of antiquities is small. Because SAM has no staff curator specializing in the period, Margaret Laird, an assistant professor of Roman art at the University of Washington, coordinated the exhibition here. She says unless you're planning a trip to Rome, this show is as good as it gets: The Louvre's Roman art is "one of the oldest and most pedigreed antiquities collections in any museum outside Italy — and we are getting the cream of the crop."

Arranged by theme, the exhibition progresses from an introductory survey of Rome and its emperors, to the rights of citizenship, the intersection of civil and military life, the lives of slaves and foreigners, religion, funerary art and Rome's legacy.

On entering, you'll first come face to face with a massive, 5-foot-tall stone head of Lucilla, the daughter of emperor Marcus Aurelius, dating to the second century A.D. If the full statue were intact and standing, she would tower 26 feet tall — flaunting the might of the empire. Lucilla's is easily the largest face in "Roman Art," but it's in keeping with the bigger-than-life, awe-inspiring scale you will see throughout the show.

The emperors' gallery

The large gallery devoted to the emperors will keep Roman history buffs engaged for a long time, beginning with magnificent statues of the first emperor Augustus and his wife, Livia. Her elegantly draped 7-foot figure is adorned as the harvest goddess Ceres, with one hand full of wheat and poppies, and a cornucopia dripping with grapes in the other. Standing in front of them, you can look beyond to the faces that symbolized an erratic continuation of power — and its abuse.

"Our idea was to show how difficult it was in Roman times for an emperor to have a successor," said the Louvre's Daniel Roger, who co-curated the show and was recently in Seattle to oversee the installation. There was no real law for succession, so jockeying for favor inside families was intense and sometimes lethal. There was bad judgment and mental illness to contend with, as was the case with the notorious Caligula, whose decidedly calm and benevolent-seeming portrait stands in contrast to the reputation for cruelty and extravagance that his name evokes. He was in power only a few years before he was murdered.

Yet even if an emperor ruled just months or weeks, we still have portraits of them, Roger said. The first thing an emperor would do is commission portraits and distribute them around the empire, his way of proving dominance. Look closely as you wend through the exhibition, and you will easily spot places where marble sculptures were reconstituted from fragments or repaired, sometimes with a new arm, as is the case with the portrait of Trajan, one of Rome's most storied leaders. His sculpted head was joined to a different massive body in full ceremonial military gear, whose right arm is a "modern" replica. (And keep in mind that when Roger uses the word modern, it can mean 18th century.)

The path to the Louvre

Each object in the show comes with at least two stories: the story of its significance in Roman times, and the story of how it came to the Louvre. One of the hottest topics in the museum world these days is provenance, the ownership record of objects and their place of origin. In recent high-profile deals, the Getty and Metropolitan museums have been pressured to return illegally obtained antiquities to Italy and Greece. The Louvre has the advantage of holding many artworks that long predate the UNESCO Convention of 1970, which prohibits import and export of antiquities that do not have a clear provenance before that date. The point is to staunch the trade in stolen archaeological objects, many wrenched from sites with no regard for their context.

Many of the Louvre's antiquities came as a legacy of the French royal family. Napoleon invaded Italy in 1797 and took substantial portions of the Vatican collection as spoils, as well as the holdings of powerful families, including the Albanis, which he paraded triumphantly back to France. In 1808, Napoleon also bought a large portion of the Borghese collection in Rome from his brother-in-law, Prince Camillo Borghese. (The Trajan sculpture was one of them.) After Napoleon died and the empire folded, many items from the Vatican were returned or repaid with French art.

Let your mind dwell on history as you look at the show. That imposing marble bust of "Antinous as Osiris," for example: The portrait was fashioned as a tribute to the emperor Hadrian's lover, a beautiful young man who mysteriously drowned in the Nile in 130 A.D. and lives on in this artwork as an Egyptian god. More than 1,600 years after it was created, the sculpture was seized by Napoleon's army from the collection of Cardinal Albani and transported to the Louvre. That was 1797, when the United States was just a fledgling nation. Now "Antinous" has been flown across the globe to visit Seattle.

Keep in mind, too, that France was once part of the Roman empire, and some pieces originated there. The "Bust of a Young Gaul" shows a "Romanized" young man in a toga, but his slight mustache and tousled hairdo — far from the nest of tight curls fashionable in Rome — betrays him as a provincial. Others pieces in the Louvre collection were excavated at Antioch in Turkey during the 1930s, archaeological digs paid for in part by the French government, Laird said. Most of the artifacts in the show have never left France since they were originally pillaged or purchased.

An exhibit of cash

So, why is the Louvre sending its treasures to the U.S.?

Money. Cash-hungry like many museums these days, France's government-owned Musée de Louvre has been packaging exhibitions and putting them on the road to generate income. Roger said the income from the shows has been spent on conservation of the Louvre's collection.

The High Museum in Atlanta reportedly paid $18 million for a three-year schedule of loans from the Louvre, with other private sponsors contributing an additional $6.4 million. Seattle Art Museum will not say how much it is paying to show "Roman Art," which was organized by the American Federation of Arts with the Louvre.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), where "Roman Art" showed first, is more forthcoming. A spokeswoman said the exhibition's rental fee was $1.5 million, which was underwritten by a grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc.

If money is the lure for the Louvre, museums here are hoping to boost their profiles and attendance numbers.

It worked in Indianapolis. "Roman Art" broke the museum's previous attendance record for an exhibit — by a lot. More than 103,000 visitors attended over the run of the show, a spokeswoman reported. Previously, the record was about 70,000. Those figures include copious numbers of children on school tours, who attend free of charge. One middle-school student reportedly came back to see the show eight times — the kind of excitement museum directors love to hear about.

At the IMA, admission is always free to the museum's collections, and the special exhibition gallery charge of $12 did not go up for "Roman Art."

At SAM, where regular admission is $13, a special exhibition charge of $7 will push the price of a ticket to "Roman Art" to new high of $20. But hey: Compared to a plane ticket to Paris, it's a deal.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com