t was a little awkward that Nero was so spectacularly decadent so early in the history of the Roman Empire. He was only the fifth emperor and the Empire endured for centuries after his death, so the facile commonplace that crime did not pay, that moral and personal decadence ensured political collapse, looked a little strained. Nero's robust challenge to historical moralizing was one of the reasons for Wilde's fascination with him. Decadence implied historical sequence, a downhill progression, but it was actually constructed transhistorically, endlessly reinvented in different historical conjunctions.
The Roses of Heliogabalus. Sir Laurence Alma Tadema OM RA (1836-1912). 1888. Oil on canvas. 132.7 x 214.4 cm. Pérez Simón Collection, Mexico. Photograph © Studio Sébert reproduced here by kind permission of the Leighton House Museum. Click on image to enlarge it.
Heat, cool marble, languor, decorous eroticism and, just occasionally, well-composed excess are presented as somehow timeless in many of the nineteenth-century paintings of Roman life executed by Alma-Tadema and others. The emphasis on domestic scenes in place of the heroic themes and public spectacle favoured by earlier generations of classical painters signals a retreat from specific history. Heliogabalus or, more correctly, Elagabalus, came to power early in the third century and was soon notorious for every kind of excess: luxurious, sexually ambiguous, he seemed to 'subvert every law of decency and nature' in Gibbon's phrase. He particularly outraged Gibbon by wearing silk, 'the first who, by this effeminate habit, had sullied the dignity of an emperor and a man'. But in Alma-Tadema's opulent painting The Roses of Heliogabalus outrage is absent and history and decadence are aestheticized into pattern and texture: the emphasis of the painting is on luxuriously reclining figures and an almost suffocating profusion of flowers seen against a back- ground of veined marble. [262-63]
Bibliography
Vance, Norman. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Last modified 16 December 2019