Perhaps no other monument of the Roman Empire can claim to have been reproduced as often in as many media as the spiral frieze on the Column of Trajan. Certainly no monument has had its reproductions reproduced as frequently, or has been studied primarily on the basis of such twice-removed representations: Conrad Cichorius’s 1896–1900 ‘editio princeps’ of the frieze, which gave the now-standard numbers to each scene, consisted of photographic plates of plaster casts. The present volume handsomely prints a previously unpublished series of photographs from 1862 of casts of the frieze, stitched together to show the denouement of the narrative. The plaster casts, taken for Napoleon III in 1861–2 (the same moulds were the basis for the Lateran casts published in Cichorius’s edition), are well known; these newly-discovered glass negatives, though, are the earliest detailed photographic documentation of the Column's scenes, and represent an important moment in the history of archaeological documentation. As a visual resource alone, for the quality and layout of its images, this volume deserves to become the new standard edition of the frieze.
Yet akin to photographs of casts of the Column, the accompanying text often feels like a reproduction of the host of earlier publications of the Column. In its general approach – treating the frieze as a documentary, visual translation of Trajan's textual commentary on the Dacian Wars – the work looks back to many predecessors, especially the positivist military history commentary on the Cichorius plates by F. Lepper and S. Frere. If more attention has recently turned to the archaeological evidence for the Column and its context on the one hand, and to the viewer's experience of the Column on the other, S.'s account dispenses with both all too quickly: arguments for the frieze being a Hadrianic addition to the Column are ignored, and the (often very fruitful) question of how people would actually engage with the Column (as well as the ways modern reproductive technologies, like casts and photographs, create very different ways of seeing the Column) are rejected in a two-page appendix as ‘un pseudo-problème’ and ‘débat sterile’ (p. 113).
The first section of the volume, ‘Un monument original entre histoire, idéologie impériale et histoire de l'art’, opens with a summary chapter on the history of attempts to reproduce and explain the Column's frieze, before offering a brief account of the Dacian Wars pursued under Domitian and Trajan that summarises aspects of S.'s earlier monograph on the topic. The historical and historiographic groundwork laid, S. moves in his third chapter towards a series of novel arguments on the propagandistic relationship between Trajan's commemorations of the Dacian Wars and those of his predecessor (also building on his earlier monograph). Supposing that two monuments at Adamklissi – a list of war casualties, and a circular monument whose foundations survive (variously identified as a tomb or a trophy celebrating Trajan's victory in 102) – are actually Domitianic in date, and that the ‘Great Trajanic Frieze’ reused on the Arch of Constantine in Rome was likewise originally part of a Domitianic monument, S. argues that the Tropaeum Traiani and Column are actually Trajanic responses to these earlier monuments. This ‘war of images’ idea also shapes S.'s fourth chapter, on the context of the Column in Trajan's Forum; for S., the way the Forum turns its back on the ‘Terrazza Domizianea’ and Trajan's Markets (which S. also dates to the Domitianic period) represents a similar impulse to repudiate Domitian's reign and draw a contrast between the two emperors. While clever, such arguments require accepting a number of contested (and improbable) chronologies; to take the least controversial case, L. Lancaster has proved that the brick stamps in the Markets show that construction cannot have started much before 107 c.e. (‘The Date of Trajan's Markets: an Assessment in the Light of Some Unpublished Brick Stamps’, PBSR 63 [1995], 25–44).
The next suite of chapters (5–7) concentrates on the sculpture itself: its production, iconography and ‘ideology’. If several carvers are attested working on the frieze, the unified conception of the frieze as an unrolling scroll that translates Trajan's commentaries on the Dacian Wars into visual terms demands a single designer. If S. is unwilling to see Apollodorus of Damascus as this designer, he nevertheless recognises Apollodorus as an important source for the scenes shown. S. also proffers new evidence for 1:1 preparatory drawings used in designing and laying out the reliefs: the three sides of the base, with their piles of arms, are composed in precisely the same manner, differing in their arrangement of shields and armour by mere centimetres and in finishing details (like the decoration of shields), with a clear dividing line that no major element crosses. S. suggests that this indicates two smaller preparatory drawings, of manageable heights on a par with the heights of the spiral frieze.
The discussion of the Column's iconography often revolves around measuring its historical veracity; where the Column is not documentary, S. argues that these departures stem from attempts to promote legibility, akin to the ways different perspectival renderings are used for architectural features to make them comprehensible. As for the interpretation of the Column's ‘message’, S. marshals a wealth of iconographic details to provide a wide-ranging account of the monument's ‘propagandistic’ value, which he supposes must come directly out of Trajan's lost Commentaries. Rather than problematising the fraught relationship (in both Antiquity and in modern, text-centric interpretative efforts) between text and image, S. gives the written word absolute primacy. Still, his careful and nuanced observations allow the occasional new interpretation of scenes and their significance. For example, S. argues that the ‘torture scene’ (p. xlv), where women in Danubian dress grab, prod and hold torches against nude and bound men, does not show barbaric Dacian women mistreating captured Roman soldiers, but rather shows Moesian women torturing Dacian captives: proof that the inhabitants of Moesia were loyal members of Trajan's empire.
The second section of the book, ‘Les compositions commentées de la fries historiée’, contains its most valuable contribution: the 1862 photographs, stitched together in the elongated format of the book so that several scenes are visible side-by-side in a way that preserves the scroll-like qualities of the frieze. Rarely are details preserved in these glass negatives that are not also apparent in the Cichorius plates, or the in situ photos of the Column taken during the conservation campaign of the 1980s. Still, the quality of the printing distinguishes this edition from its predecessors, and combined with the detailed scene-by-scene commentary that appears above and below the frieze, makes this the most useful edition of its type to date.
The final section, ‘La Colonne Trajane, un empereur, des moulages et des images: une campagne photographique sous le Second Empire’, by H. Chew (curator of the Musée d'Archéologie nationale, where the negatives are housed) represents a model of curatorial detective work in locating the photographs in their precise historical and cultural milieu. Using details in the negatives and archival research, Chew demonstrates that the casts must have been photographed in the Palais de l'Industrie in July–August 1862, perhaps by Augustin Gueuvin. With sections that set the casts and photographs within the context of Napoleon III's political and archaeological campaigns, as well as within the burgeoning photographic industry of Second-Empire Paris, Chew's essay will be a welcome addition to the historiography of archaeology.
Whether or not we need another military history of the Dacian Wars read from Trajan's Column, this volume stands as an important contribution to the photographic documentation of Rome's most reproduced monument, and to the history of archaeological documentation more broadly.
