Venus in the City: Alma-Tadema’s Female Figures and the Creation of an Erotic Geography

Written by Taryn Power
Edited by Jacob Anthony

Figure 1. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Unconscious Rivals, 1893, Oil on canvas, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.

Introduction

A review of Lawrence Alma​​-Tadema’s 1893 piece Unconscious Rivals (fig. 1) in the London-based magazine The Spectator notes dismissively that “Mr. Tadema sends a picture which, as usual, is full of pleasant things.”​​¹ These things include: two Classical marble statues in front of a marble balustrade carved in relief, a brightly-painted vaulted ceiling, an oleander tree with vibrant pink flowers, and two women draped in Roman dress. Our reviewer’s grievance is not with Alma-Tadema’s skill but with a perceived disjointedness in the scene, noting that it appears more as a “catalogue of precious objects” than a “poet’s description;” it might have been a “pretty bit of still-life” if the figures had not been added “like little chimney-piece ornaments.”² This review from a widely-read newspaper reveals a trend in the popular reception of Alma-Tadema’s genre scenes: his work is defined by the obsessive rendering of locations and artefacts from Classical antiquity, either as proof of his creative erudition or a dry antiquarianism. Most scholarship has similarly focussed on Alma-Tadema’s antiquarian style, and the relationship of Alma-Tadema’s work to the context of academic Victorian classicism. In these discussions, as in the above review, the female figures remain tangential to the focus on Alma-Tadema’s adaptation of antiquity. Yet, discourses on gender were particularly fraught in the late Victorian era, dominating the same publications in which Alma-Tadema’s works were reviewed and published.³ These discourses, I will argue, were closely related to and often mediated by the dominant culture of classicism in this era.

Using Unconscious Rivals and other Roman genre scenes as a case study, I will examine the use of Roman literature and history as a language for discourse about gender, sexuality, and urbanity in late-nineteenth century London. First, I will attend to the paintings themselves, using both visual evidence from the pieces as well as evidence of their reception to argue that the antique references contribute to an eroticization of the female subjects. I will next explore Alma-Tadema’s involvement in the theatre, particularly in classically-inspired “toga-plays,” as a parallel phenomenon in London culture: on both stage and canvas, the female figure against an ancient backdrop becomes an ambiguously available object of desire. Finally, drawing on contemporary discourses of the moral dangers of urban life, I will propose a connection between Alma-Tadema’s female figures in his imagined Rome and those in the Rome of the Roman poet Ovid. In both, the city becomes a space of erotic wonder through the placement of female figures throughout. These three parallel examinations of classical reception and gendered discourse reveal that in Unconscious Rivals and similar pieces, the Roman background and the women within combine together to create an imaginary, erotic geography for its nineteenth century (male) viewer.

Surroundings; or, “I painted that picture in order to use that ceiling!”

Before following these three lines of investigation, I will first highlight a few aspects of the painting which will be my primary focus. Unconscious Rivals is, as The Spectator’s review hinted, a characteristic example of Alma-Tadema’s work. A little over half a metre wide, and slightly less-than-half in height, it is most striking for its colour palette: shining white marble on the balustrade and statues, bright pink flowers on a potted oleander-tree, and a ceiling covered in vibrant designs of orange and teal. The location is uncertain, read either as a country villa, for the hint of the ocean visible in the background,⁴ or an urban street, due to the cavernous ceiling which recalls sites such as the Basilica Maxentius in the forum in Rome.⁵ At centre, there are two female figures, dressed opulently in coloured stole and several items of gold jewellery. One is seated, gazing thoughtfully towards, but not at, the viewer and the other, leaning against the balustrade, gazes down beyond it at something or someone hidden from our view. The seated woman’s hand reaches toward that of her companion—they seem to be grasping the same bouquet of pink oleanders which must have been plucked from the tree—but their familiarity is complicated by the title, which implies a rivalry, potentially romantic, as yet unknown to the pair, which will come between them. After this initial inspection, we arrive at a relatively innocuous tale of romance, longing, and jealousy.

Figure 2. Leopold Löwenstam (after Lawrence Alma-Tadema), Hide and Seek, 1891, etching on tissue, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Such readings of romantic desire into Alma-Tadema’s female figures is common in their contemporary reception. In her biography of the artist, Helen Zimmern claims a viewer of Expectations (1885) “will see with pleasure the perfection of this maiden's hands. Her figure is one of rare grace as she reposes here, the warm sunshine about her, watching eagerly the skiff that is skimming over the water, and which we may venture think holds her lover.”⁶ Georg Ebers, likewise a friend and biographer of Alma-Tadema, consistently fills his descriptions of Alma-Tadema’s genre pieces with imaginings of what the women are up to: reflecting on Hide-and-Seek (fig. 2), he muses:

“the wild little maid—perhaps the gardener's daughter—has hidden behind the herma and is listening for the play mate who is seeking her and steals up so softly that he will surprise the wilful elf with the thick locks of hair and the saucy eyes. The boy has won in the game of hide and seek; but will he not lose in the more serious one with this fairy lassie?”⁷

This picture, a reconstruction of the Villa Albiani in Rome, becomes a scene of childish courtship; the young girl, who gazes out at the viewer and silences us with a finger to her mouth, becomes a sort of temptress-in-training, with her willfulness, wildness, and sauciness indications of the boy’s eventual defeat by her. His musings are no less imaginative in scenes with fewer clues: turning to a piece he calls the “Flower-Girl,” (fig. 3) he claims that, “with the gay children of the spring she offers for sale, will probably remind every one of Dionysius' graceful epigram: ‘Roses are blooming on thy cheek, with roses thy basket is laden, / Which dost thou sell? The flowers? Thyself? Or both, my pretty maiden?’”⁸ With no one else on the canvas, and nothing to indicate her activities but the flowers she surrounds herself with, Ebers’ mind—and, he presumes, the viewer’s as well—turns to an ancient quotation that implies her sexual availability. When the contemporary viewer’s eyes are turned to the female figures, nearly without exception, the imaginations turn amatory, filling in an absent lover, a courtship to come, or a soliciting customer where the canvas gives us none. As this last example illustrates, however, these imaginings are not always innocent: based solely off the presence of flowers and her location on an empty street, details also present in Unconscious Rivals, her status slips from innocent maiden to prostitute. Thus, we can see emerging a relationship between the female figure and her surroundings which points to her erotic availability to the viewer.

Figure 3. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, On the Steps of the Capitoline or The Garland-Seller, 1872, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection.

This ambiguity of status and availability conferred on female subjects echoes what many scholars have argued about gender in late-Victorian painting; in particular, that respectability and sexuality were always problems lurking below the surface. Kathy Psomiades notes the wealth of factors affecting the conception of gender—and particularly, femininity—in the Victorian era, particularly related to domesticity, sexuality, and the ideology of “separate spheres”—wherein, while men the woman is “private and domestic, spiritual yet sexualized, the irresistible object of desire and a certain kind of especially contemplative subject.”⁹ Pamela Gerrish Nunn cites an 1858 article in the Athenaeum which characterises “division between men and women” as one which “occup[ies] the attention of our whole community and with no small effect.”¹⁰ In this era of the “problem picture,”¹¹ she argues, paintings are most “scrutized for their sexual politics,” their relation to the “woman question.”¹² Joseph Kestner cites a series of reforms in the 1870s and 1880s to argue for it as a period of “sexual transition”¹³—including the introduction of the Married Women’s Property Act¹⁴ and the debates over the Contagious Diseases Act,¹⁵ in conjunction with increased medical interest in women’s sexuality as evidenced by several treatises.¹⁶ The period of Alma-Tadema’s work is one in which the culture was obsessed with women’s sexuality: the erotic implications that Ebers and Zimmern read into Alma-Tadema’s female figures, then, is easily understandable when considered in relation to the sexual politics of the era.

Yet, Psomiades’ argument rests primarily on the work of Aesthetic painters, a movement to which Alma-Tadema was closely related but not one he belonged to, and whose female figures are are characterised by “their white flesh, sometimes marked with blue veins or bruises, their golden or midnight hair, their full lips, their soulful eyes, their heaving breasts.”¹⁷ The female nude, characteristic of classical-subject paintings of the period, makes few appearances in Alma-Tadema’s corpus, and even less often as a stand-alone piece.¹⁸ While the gender discourses of moral debates and legal reform forms a common background to both Alma-Tadema and the more obviously erotic work of his colleagues, can we truly include Unconscious Rivals’ fully clothed, apparently unremarkable maidens in this cultural obsession? Yes, I will argue, on the grounds of clues hidden within the canvas which surround the female figure: within the seemingly dry antiquarian details of the canvases, Alma-Tadema has hidden direct references to classical models of sexuality and eroticism.

Figure 4. Ceiling paintings from Nero’s Domus Aurea c. 65 CE, Rome.

By Alma-Tadema’s own description, Unconscious Rivals began as a painting about a ceiling.¹⁹ This focus, which might strike a contemporary reader as odd, is deeply rooted in Victorian Classicism. As Barrow explains, practically no decorated ceilings from antiquity survive, and none so large—she lists the closest possible model to be the “vaulted ceilings from Nero’s Golden House in Rome which were discovered in the sixteenth century.”²⁰ The Golden House is a particularly evocative model to choose due to its legacy as a symbol of the extreme decadence of one of Rome’s most infamous emperors. As is the case for many Roman sites, including Pompeii and the Roman Forum, systematic excavations only began on this ancient palace in the 19th century, and a great deal of the site remained unearthed at the time of Alma-Tadema’s work.²¹ Alma-Tadema’s ceiling indeed has many similarities to the designs on the palace’s: both intersperse vegetal motifs and figured scenes in rectangular frames across the ceiling’s wide arch, predominantly using tones of orange and green (see fig. 4).​​ Alma-Tadema’s ceiling is not an exact reconstruction. In particular, its colours are necessarily much more vibrant, fitting to his mission to erase the distance between his canvas and the Roman past. Yet, the elaborate decoration certainly points to a similar level of luxury and expense. This reconstruction is characteristic of Alma-Tadema, on the level of both contemporary archaeological interest and its likely reference if not directly particularly (in)famous site and emperor, at least to the culture of decadence which characterises imperial Rome through a Victorian gaze.

Indeed this image of decadent Rome is constantly present in receptions of Alma-Tadema. In an 1883 lecture on the current styles of art in England and their proponents, art-critic and philosopher John Ruskin, who would have art judge almost solely on its moral value, criticises Alma-Tadema for making it his “heavenly mission to pourtray” Rome in its “last corruption [...] and its Bacchanalian frenzy.”²² The vast majority of Alma-Tadema’s historical scenes focus on the late-Imperial period of Rome. In 1871, he painted A Roman Emperor, depicting a member of the praetorian guard bowing to a cowering Claudius, quite literally over the body of the assassinated Caligula, his nephew and predecessor. The Roses of Heliogabalus from 1888 shows the short-lived emperor raining flower petals upon his dinner guests, resulting in many being smothered to death, or so the story goes.²³ His 1907 canvas Caracalla and Geta depicts the two sons of the emperor Septimius Severus in a magnificently decorated box in the Colosseum; the brooding Caracalla stares at his triumphant younger, but favoured, brother, Geta, foreshadowing Geta’s murder and Caracalla’s coming reign. According to Edward Gibbon, Caracalla would surpass even Nero and Domitian in tyranny to become the “common enemy of mankind.”²⁴ Gibbon’s famous view of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wherein successive emperors’ hedonism and cruelty brought about the decadence and decline of the once-great Rome, is clearly echoed in Alma-Tadema’s canvases. Seldom focusing on the positively-viewed Republican or Augustan era, it is Rome’s worst rulers, and their eras of dissolution and cruelty, which characterise Alma-Tadema’s Roman world. Elizabeth Prettejohn notes that Alma-Tadema is not alone in this: the taking up of such ignominious episodes from Roman history by several artists in the late 19th century was, she argues, a deliberate turn against the exempla virtutis, moralistic view of earlier history painting.²⁵ Further, she notes that the movement towards genre painting, to which Alma-Tadema in particular devotes the majority of his time, is the “final stage in the repudiation,” of this earlier tradition.²⁶ Forgoing the presentation of specific moments of immorality in Ancient Rome, the resulting decadence of Rome becomes a mere backdrop to scenes of everyday life, the effects of which I will explore next.

Returning to a piece we have already seen, On the Steps of the Capitoline from 1874 (fig. 3)—likely the piece which Ebers named “the Flower-Seller,” or at least very similar to it. The majority of the picture is taken up by the plain white marble of the grand staircase, on which a garland-seller sits, with her flowers scattered around her. To the far right, above a busy pathway, the Arch of Septimius Severus is recognizable, predominantly from the two lines of inscription at the very edge of the canvas. This arch may have been chosen simply for its placement at the base of the Capitoline Hill, the setting of this piece, or due to the rising interest in the Roman forum due to an increase in excavations in this decade.²⁷ However, this specific Arch, as the only recognizable site-marker in the canvas, is most remarkable for its relation to an infamous moment in Imperial history. After Caracalla’s assassination of his brother Geta, the elder brother was completely scratched from this historical record, and the removal of his name from their father’s arch is still visible on the upper part of the inscription Alma-Tadema depicts here. Thus, just outside the frame lurks the betrayal and tyranny of Caracalla, adding another layer of immorality to the scene which, as mentioned above, was already read as one where the flower-seller might be selling herself as well as her flowers.

Figure 5. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Coliseum, 1896, Oil on canvas, Private collection; with details.

Figure 6. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Thermae Antoninianae, 1899, Oil on canvas, Private collection.

Later in his career, Alma-Tadema’s genre scenes become even more elaborate in their depiction of Roman sites. For example, The Coliseum (fig. 5) completed in 1896 and Thermae Antoninianae (fig. 6) from 1899 both show the imaginative, yet meticulously researched, reconstruction of the city of Rome which is characteristic of Alma-Tadema’s work. In Thermae Antoninianae a bath scene, which was a common subject in Alma-Tadema’s corpus, reaches the height of detail. Again, we encounter the figure of Caracalla: the bath complex was started in the third century CE by Septimius Severus and finished by Caracalla, whose name the baths generally take in English. The Baths of Caracalla were situated on the outskirts of Rome and were the focus, like the forum, of many studies by travellers through the 19th century.²⁸ Alma-Tadema himself owned many photographs and drawings of the site, and Barrow notes in particular the studies of a Russian architect, S.A. Ivanoff, published with commentary in 1898, as a source of inspiration for this piece.²⁹ Another influence is certainly the Baths of Diocletian, which through its transformation into a church in the 16th century, and renovations in the 18th, provides an example of how the cavernous spaces, vaulted ceilings and granite columns of an ancient bath complex might be restored from its ruined state.³⁰ Similarly, the 1896 painting The Coliseum, presents a restored vision of the most famous of Roman sites: the walls are restored, as are the velae—a contraption used to shade spectators, from the sun—and each niche is filled with carefully rendered, recognizable marble statues, including the Discobolus and the Prima Porta Augustus (see details of fig. 5). In both scenes, Rome is restored to perfection, complete with details which make use of recent scholarship and famous artefacts.

This restoration is in both cases an imaginative one. Focussing on particular details of the paintings reveals again Alma-Tadema’s particular perspective of Rome. In the backdrop of Thermae Antoninianae, men and women are shown in the nude, bathing, though not in the same pools, in the same room. Although Roman baths are, as Christopher Wood notes, a “favourite subject” of the Victorian painter and his audience—for the “pretty girls” to the same degree as the skillful rendering of “marble”³¹—these canvases typically show only women in the space of the public baths.³² Thus, to the already less-than-exemplary reputation of Caracalla is added the scandalous detail of nude men and women sharing space. Further, as Barrow notes, Alma-Tadema tucks a famous sculpture in the background, the Apoxyomenos, which depicts an athlete scraping oil from his body.³³ This action is likewise alluded to in Alma-Tadema’s particularly erotic depiction of a female nude in The Tepidarium.³⁴ Its erotic implications are heightened by Pliny’s comment that it was so admired by the emperor Tiberius that he demanded it be removed to his own bedchamber.³⁵

Likewise, in the foreground of The Coliseum, a large-scale sculpture of a satyr sits on the edge of the balcony on which the female figures sit, looking out at the many figures gathering, presumably, for the games at the amphitheatre. The satyr is a figure common to Classical art and literature; it is also a figure explicitly associated with illicit sexuality.³⁶ As are gladiatorial games: Juvenal tells of a Roman matron who left her respectable life to be the mistress—or gladiatress—of a particularly dreamy champion of the ring,³⁷ while Ovid remarks on the possibilities of soliciting a sexual partner during the games.³⁸ The erotic aspect of Gladiatorial games and its feminine fans had already gained celebrity in the form of Simeon Solomon’s 1865 piece Habet! which portrays the female spectators’ of the games, captivated to an extent which appears erotic—one flushes slightly, her mouth falling open; another has let her head fall back and eyes close, her hair coming undone and the veins on her neck popping.³⁹ This detail brings us back to Unconscious Rivals where we find, to the right of the figures, a particularly famous statue of a Seated Gladiator. If this reference were not enough to imply a certain degree of eroticism, Alma-Tadema also includes, enlarged to ease our viewing, a figurine of Eros—the divine personification of desire—wearing a mask of Silenus—a satyr god, connected not only the satyr’s wild sexuality but with Bacchus, god of wine and revelry.⁴⁰

Unlike in history scenes, however, the figures do little to explain this aspect of immorality. Where we can find historical records of Caracalla’s tyranny, Caligula’s sexual perversion, or Nero’s decadence, in these genres scenes, the actions, feelings, and characters of the groups of women are difficult to discern. The common, usually dismissive, description of Alma-Tadema’s figures as “Victorians in togas” seems problematic when applied to his female figures in light of their surroundings; the placement of Victorian women in any public space, let alone one filled with allusions to sexuality, is a marked image in this era of separate spheres, where, if we recall Psomiades’ argument, women were intended to be private beings, and their presence in public was associated with courting (erotic) attention.⁴¹ I have already discussed the reading of sexual availability onto the flower-seller in On the Steps of the Capitoline, which is the most explicit example of the eroticization of these female figures, but it is perhaps even more prevalent in the other scenes. The three lounging women in Thermae Antoninianae might, on their own, seem like three young Victorian women gossiping innocently, but the erotic backdrop of the baths places their status immediately in question. This ambiguity of status is perhaps increased by their lack of obvious participation in the bathing ritual: for what purpose are they lounging, elaborately dressed, in this space? Likewise, the two women and the young girl in the Coliseum appear to merely be watching the procession, safely from a balcony. Yet, when we draw in the figure of the satyr and recall the sexuality implied in the gladiatorial games, we begin to wonder about the woman leaning over the edge—what is she looking at, and exactly what sort of fall the young girl is pulling her back from?⁴² The women in Unconscious Rivals are the most ambiguous: surrounded by statues which allude to illicit sexuality and oleanders, a poisonous flower, in a location whose private or public nature is unclear, at least one who obviously yearns to cross over the barrier of the balustrade, the innocence of their rivalry is no longer certain: exactly what sort of attention are they vying against each other for? In short, in these genre scenes, the antique details, when read in connection to rather than separated from the female figures, introduce subtle indications of eroticism to an audience well-versed in classical antiquity. To an educated audience, these genre scenes and their female figures take on an intriguing ambiguity, their implied erotic availability tied to both the exotic beauty of the ancient world and the intellectual stimulation of their classical references.

The Theatre; or, “The old Romans were…moved by the same passions.”⁴³

Expanding our focus beyond Alma-Tadema’s canvases, we can find several other examples of the potential eroticism of classical antiquity. In particular, the theatre, where popular plays often drew on tales from Ancient Rome is an important parallel to Alma-Tadema’s canvases, and one which is easily draw, due to the artists’ own participation in the theatre as a set and costume designer. Peter Trippi notes the extreme popularity of theatre in late 19th century London, with “more than 300 amateur dramatics groups” in the city by the 1870s, with “original plays set in antiquity, revivals of Shakespeare’s plays set in the ancient world, and Aesthetic productions based on classical precedents.”⁴⁴ On the stages of London, as in the canvases of the Royal Academy, the Ancient World was alive and breathing. The connections between the visual art world and the theatre were extremely close, with many artists designing sets and costumes for the stage. For most artists involved in the theatre, including Alma-Tadema, their involvement with the first two of Trippi’s categories: Shakespeare and original “toga plays.” The latter category, which drew primarily on contemporary novels set in the ancient world, will be my focus. Alma-Tadema’s work on the stage is characterised by the same obsessive accuracy as his paintings: one journalist noted of his costumes for Hypatia, a modern play set in late-antique Roman Alexandria, that “every robe or toga [...] has a different embroidery, accurately copied from a model or mosaic of the period.”⁴⁵ The reception of this particular play is nearly identical to that of Alma-Tadema’s genre pieces: most praise focuses on Alma-Tadema’s accuracy in recreating antiquity for the stage, while the story is hardly noted.

The connection between stage and canvas goes beyond Alma-Tadema’s involvement in both: there is also a clear parallel between the toga play and the Roman genre scene in terms of content and relationship to the classical past. The goal of both was unequivocally to present the ancient past as “not only a lived, but a living reality,” resurrected through archaeological detail onto the stage or canvas,⁴⁶ which is the most obvious of Alma-Tadema’s tactics in both painting and set-design to create a living Rome. Yet there is a clear sense that the continuity goes beyond material objects: Alma-Tadema’s comment, which informs the title of this section, might also be used to characterise the impulse of the toga play: “The old Romans were…moved by the same passions,” as those of modern England.⁴⁷ Simon Goldhill notes the prevalence of this sentiment in Victorian culture, noting that in popular media such as the classical novel and toga play, “Emotions are the bedrock of historical continuity and of comprehension of the past.”⁴⁸ Thus, the emotions inspired by the events of the melodramas on the stage are a key aspect to this resurrection-model of classical reception. In the case of Hypatia, as Goldhill notes, the emotion which the main character felt toward the eponymous heroine was sexual attraction, causing him a crisis of faith.⁴⁹ In the original novel, her eventual death is described in what Goldhill deems “prurient terms”: “her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.”⁵⁰ The poster for the production which Alma-Tadema designed shows Hypatia in the nude on a Christian altar, moments before her violent end.⁵¹ As Barrow notes, this detail reveals a certain eroticization of female martyrdom and victimhood, present in many depictions of Hypatia as well as other female saints or tragic heroines.⁵² This element of sexuality in the (completely non-sexual) victimhood of a female figure recalls the focus on the fallen woman in Victorian painting,⁵³ as well as the appropriation of all female victims from antiquity as icons of the widespread evil of prostitution, which Kestner examines.⁵⁴ Barrow argues also that this eroticism often intersects with portrayals of decadence and immorality. For example, the figure of “Cleopatra, wearing a diaphanous dress and a leopard-skin cape, exud[ing] voluptuousness,”⁵⁵ as well as dangerous sexuality, or the vain seductress Berenice, who in The Sign of the Cross symbolises the decadence of Rome under Nero and its danger to the play’s hero.⁵⁶ The female figures in the toga play clearly fall into the “Madonna/Whore” dichotomy; regardless of which sign they fall to, however, they become objects of desire.⁵⁷

Let us now reverse this parallel to focus once again on the female figures in our genre scenes. The set, props, and costumes are rendered with the exact same attention to detail and accuracy with which Alma-Tadema dressed his stages and actresses. Their audience and cultural context, too, are shared, both falling in the liminal space between “popular” and “serious.”⁵⁸ As I have already mentioned, much of their reception with regards to accuracy and incorporation of classical details were remarkably similar as well. Thus, it is not much of a stretch to imagine that the female figures in this painting would be viewed in a similar light to the female characters of the classicizing theatre production. One major difference arises from reasons of medium: where the theatre can offer viewers a clear narrative and clear character labels, the stillness of a painting denies this clarity and increases the ambiguity of the female figures. Nonetheless, I will argue, as we trace this parallel between modern London and ancient Rome outside of the theatre, the ambiguity of our female figures’ sexual availability is heightened by the erotic intrigue of urban space.

The Streets of London, the Streets of Rome

This availability can be traced through both the reality of London outside of the theatre and the literary evidence from Rome. Beginning first in the literal, we can compare the status of the actual actresses from the theatre to that of the female figures we have been studying. Barrow notes the consistent view of actresses in the Victorian era as “morally dubious” figures.⁵⁹ Tracy Davis likewise notes the consistent presence of actresses in pornography in the late Victorian period.⁶⁰ Further, she argues, the theatres themselves became part of an “erotic neighborhood” within the city of London: London’s West End became, as the population of the city grew, a site for many entertainment venues, from theatres to burlesques and music halls.⁶¹ This last category was singled out for its questionable morality: an 1875 article on “London’s amusements” by an A. Marshall states that “No one ever got improvement from a music hall—happy they who only got headaches.”⁶² This headache is referred to as the “companion” the patron had paid to accompany him to bed.⁶³ As Laura Eastlake notes, this description is highly euphemistic; the other companions one might take to bed, and the illness other than headaches lurk in the background—in short, the shadow of prostitution and the fears present in Contagious Diseases Act are closely connected to the entertainment district.⁶⁴ In actuality, the concentration of entertainment venues was complimented by the concentration of other forms of entertainment in the area: supper clubs, illegal gaming houses and shops for erotic prints lined the streets which became well-known as “prostitution markets.”⁶⁵ Thus, the actresses who worked and moved through these so-called “thoroughfares of vice” became part of the “erotic marketplace.”⁶⁶ The sexual possibilities of the theatre pour out into the surrounding neighborhoods and the label of sexuality follows the female figures from the stage into the city street. Through the analog of the actress, we might follow Alma-Tadema’s female figures onto the streets of Rome as well.

Elizabeth Prettejohn reads Alma-Tadema’s reconstructions of Ancient Rome as directly related to the growing awareness of the modern city in the late Victorian era.⁶⁷ The “Roman building projects” explored through the detailed rendering of famous sites, parallel modern depictions of Haussman’s transformation of Paris while the urban entertainments of the modern city—“cafés, theatres and racetracks”—find an equivalent in Roman baths and amphitheatres.⁶⁸ Above all, for the Roman women depicted in the public spaces of Rome “social and moral status is as ambiguous or problematic as many female figures in contemporary French painting.”⁶⁹ While Prettejohn focuses on the parallel of Paris, the emblematic modern city as defined by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1940), Laura Eastlake notes the trend in late Victorian to mirror modern London with ancient Rome. This parallel rests upon the glory of both cities as an Imperial capital and the degeneration of both through decadence.⁷⁰ In particular, she notes how the modern “metropolitan male” becomes associated with the decadence of ancient Rome: the value of the grand monuments of an Imperial city is supplanted by the urban entertainments of ancient Rome and of modern London, leading to urban men becoming “degenerated.”⁷¹ These entertainments are surely the same which I have discussed above, mixing theatre and music houses with explicitly erotic endeavours and, of course, the women “of ambiguous or problematic status” which Prettejohn mentions. Moreover, the characterization of this degeneration as enfeebling and emasculating, using near pathological terms,⁷² makes an easy parallel to the discourses surrounding the dangers of prostitution and venereal disease encompassed by the Contagious Diseases Act.⁷³ Rome as a stand in for modern London is an explicitly, and often dangerously, erotic geography.

This view of the city as an eroticized space has Classical precedent as well. In the Satires of Horace, perhaps the most popular of Latin poets in the 19th century,⁷⁴ Rome emerges as a city of excess in every way, from violence to sexuality.⁷⁵ In contrast to his effusively optimistic Odes, the Satires offer an apt parallel to the differing views of Rome and London as cities; these two views from a single poet show that the glorious capital and the dissolute city exist as two sides of the same coin. As Paul Allen Miller argues, Horace’s tour through Rome swings from the discovery of a corpse on the street among the “orders of flute girls, quacks, panhandlers, actresses, and acrobats” to the figures of men chasing after women both “whose ankles are hidden by wife’s flounces”—that is respectable matrons—and those who are “standing in a stinking whorehouse.”⁷⁶ In this vision of Rome, all women are sexually available, and vice is unavoidable. It mirrors the moralistic writings cited by Eastlake and Kestner which fear a rampant and debilitating sexuality in the city. Horace’s model of ancient Rome, in short, can be read as a clear parallel to the conservative fear of decadent Rome in Victorian discourse.

This darkly moralistic and pessimistic view on Rome feels incongruous with Alma-Tadema’s bright canvases. Thus I will trace a possible counter narrative. As Eastlake argues, the image of decadent Rome is deliberately adopted by figures such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater to defy the conservative associations of Roman excess with decline.⁷⁷ The decadence of Rome becomes an aesthetic utopia; Nero becomes an aesthete, a musician, an artist rather than a mad tyrant.⁷⁸ This transformation recalls a comment of Ebers’ on one of Alma-Tadema’s particularly elaborate interiors: why shouldn’t Alma-Tadema depict a golden room, if “Nero, with all his crimes a thorough artist in his nature, wanted to live in a golden palace?”⁷⁹ This quotation encapsulates the counter narrative taken up by Aesthetic artists, and brings us back to the elaborate ceiling of Unconscious Rivals, which, I have argued, likely recalled the luxurious decoration of Nero’s palace. This counter-narrative does not erase the sexual availability of the female figures which, I have argued, is created through several overlapping factors from contemporary discourses and popular culture to archaeological references. To this, I would propose a potential Classical literary source as a celebratory counterpoint to the conservative narrative encapsulated by Horace to complete my exploration of the role of Roman models in creating eroticism in this painting.

In the Ars Amatoria, Ovid takes the reader on a tour through Rome; unlike the Satires, the Ars Amatoria takes a view that is unapologetically excited by the erotic possibilities of Rome. Ovid promises his reader, “‘Rome will give you so many and such lovely girls, / as many [...] as there are fishes in the sea, / as there are birds hidden in branches, as stars in the sky.”⁸⁰ Moreover, he links “lovely girls” to specific sites of Rome, creating, as Miller notes, a parallel city to Augustus’ Res Gestae—a listing, among other deeds, of the emperor’s imperial building projects.⁸¹ In the Ars Amatoria, imperial capital and erotic wonderland are wed together, most explicitly in Ovid’s comment that, Venus, “Aeneas’ mother, lingers in his city.”⁸² From its founding, the poem claims, desire has been inherent to the city of Rome; love becomes a cultural fact of Rome.⁸³ As Ovid advises his reader to look for women in the theatre, where “they come to see, they come that they might be seen as well,” in that place “fatal to chaste modesty,”⁸⁴ we are brought back to the Victorian London stage, and the perceived sexuality of the actresses who populate it. When Ovid places us among the crowd of the gladiatorial games, where one can “sit by your lady, with nothing forbidding: press your thigh to hers as long as you can,”⁸⁵ we recall the engrossed women in The Coliseum and the gladiator placed suggestively next to the Unconscious Rivals. Taking the Ars Amatoria as a model refigures the metropolitan male viewing these canvases, strolling, figuratively and literally, around the decadent cityscapes of Rome and London. Incorporating the reception of Ovid into our understanding of Alma-Tadema presents an alternative perspective on the erotic geography created by the canvases: one of enjoyment, with a deliberately subversive, or at least tongue-in-cheek celebration of the sensuality of the ancient and modern city.

Conclusion

This paper, while necessarily preoccupied with unpacking the male gaze, sought to explore the status of women in Alma-Tadema’s genre scenes. The depiction of women in Ovid’s text is just as ambiguous. As Sharon James argues, Ovid deliberately mixes the symbols of virtuous women with those of courtesans or prostitutes, making it unclear which sort of women the reader is going to find among the glorious streets of Rome.⁸⁶ Either way, her role in the text is to be seduced—in short, to be a passive recipient of male desire. This role is likewise characteristic of the figures in Alma-Tadema’s genre scenes. We cannot completely and definitively understand the characters and status of the female figures, but regardless, they are presented to the male viewer as ambiguously available. Like actresses on the Victorian stage, they might play any manner of role from the maiden pining for her sweetheart, to a prostitute awaiting a customer. This shifting identity, hinted at through minute details in the canvas, is a key aspect of the paintings’ entertainment value. The gaze of the Upper-class Victorian man on these canvases is one of intellectual as well as sensual interest: through his classical education he is able to puzzle together the disparate pieces of evidence, taken from the most obscure of Classical sources and up-to-date scholarship to understand the erotic implications of the piece. Yet, popular culture also provides a gateway into these pieces for the middle-class man: through the theatre, through magazines and newspapers, or perhaps simply through the experience of a man in the urban spaces of London. The imagined world of Alma-Tadema’s Rome, like Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, is full of girls which the artist, the traditions of literature both Classic and modern, as well as cultural discourses, define as sexually available.

Thus, Alma-Tadema’s Roman scenes portray an erotic geography which is heightened by the ambiguity of their female figures. Visual analysis of the paintings themselves reveals many allusions to a decadent image of Ancient Rome, with specific references to sexuality and desire via the incorporation of ancient art as well as allusions to ancient texts. A strong connection between Alma-Tadema’s work in the theatre likewise connects the female figures to the desiring and desirable women of the stage, as well as the sexualized actresses who played them. Finally, the creation of an urban space on the canvases reflects both contemporary and ancient discourses of urbanity in which the public appearance of a female figure is connected to erotic encounters and often, illicit sexuality. We have passed far beyond the viewing of Unconscious Rivals and similar pieces as mere “pleasant things. We now begin to understand them as participating in a complex cultural dialogue on gender and sexuality; of history and its afterlife in the present.

Endnotes

1.  “The New Gallery,” editorial, The Spectator, May 6 1893, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/6th-may-1893/19/art.

2. “The New Gallery,” editorial, The Spectator, May 6 1893.

3. For example: the London-based literary magazine Athenaeum, cited below as the location of the essay “The Woman Question,” which singled out the division between men and women as the most important debate of the era, was also home to countless reviews of Alma-Tadema’s work from across his career. These discourses on gender, then, were often taking place in front of the same audience as Alma-Tadema’s work.

4. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 126. Prettejohn suggests the Bay of Naples, a known vacation site for the Roman elite with a reputation for licentiousness, as a possible setting.

5. Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth Century British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 273.

6. Helen Zimmern, L. Alma Tadema, Royal Academician: His Life and Work (London: 1888), 24.

7. Georg Ebers, Lorenz Alma-Tadema: His Life and Works, trans. Mary J. Safford (New York: William S. Gottsberger 1886), 76.

8. Ebers, Lorenz Alma-Tadema, 47–48. 

9. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4.

10. Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting (Hants, UK: Scolar Press, 1995): 1.

11. Gerrrish Nunn posits the Victorian era as an era which developed a “problematic picture” as a “recognizable category, and further contends that “given the fundamental challenge Victorian society faced in the ‘woman question,’ any Victorian picture that involved women and men” can be read as one” (2).

12. Gerrish Nunn, Problem Pictures, 1.

13. Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth Century British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 36.

14. The 1870 act and its 1882 additions allowed women to maintain property rights after marriage, including the right to her earnings after marriage, as well as to inheritances and insurance policies. Kestner notes that “in establishing that women could have independent ownership of property, the act broadened the sphere of influence of women.” Mythology and Misogyny, 35.

15. The Act allowed for the arrest and inspection of women suspected of being prostitutes. Kestner discusses how it was tied to fears of venereal disease, believed to be spread only by women, who became “seductresses who turn men into beasts,” like the figure of Circe (90). Its repeal in 1886 heightened focus on the “hazardous and distressing situation of destitute women,” but, Kestner argues, likely increased the vision of women as “threatening and unnatural” (35).

16. Kestner notes (36–37), for example, William Acton’s claim in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857) that while sexual desire was natural to men, “as a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself;” lust was associated with only “a few of [female nature’s] worst examples.” This was refuted by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor, in 1884, who argued in The Human Element in Sex that women “derived pleasure from their sexuality.”

17. Psomiades, Femininity and Representation, 1.

18. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 69. He notes Alma-Tadema’s most infamous nude, The Sculptor’s Model, about which the Bishop of Carslisle commented, “For a living artist to exhibit a life-size, life-like, almost photographic representation of a beautiful naked woman strikes my inartistic mind as somewhat if not very mischievous.” This comment reveals the cultural anxiety over sexuality in art, and the resulting necessity for subtlety in depicting eroticism.

19. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, “Laurens Alma-Tadema, R.A,” in In the Days of My Youth, ed. T. P. O’Connor (London: 1901), 206. Alma-Tadema recalls he had originally designed the ceiling for another canvas but had scratched it out. On urging from a friend to reuse it, he chose to paint Rivals: “To express it more aptly, I painted that picture in order to use that ceiling!”

20. Rosemary Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema (London: Phaidon Press, 2001), 150. 

21. J. G. Winter briefly reviews the excavations at the Domus Aurea from 1811 to 1914 in “The Golden House of Nero,” The Classical Weekly 7, no. 21 (March 28, 1914): 163–164. Several rooms were discovered as late as 1913.

22. John Ruskin, The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford (Kent: George Allen, 1884), 103.

23. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 134. Barrow points out that Alma-Tadema employs the obscure text Scriptores Historiae Augustae, whose tale is more sensational that the more traditionally cited source on imperial history, Suetonius.

24. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D.M. Low (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1960), 69.

25. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Recreating Rome in Victorian Painting: From History to Genre,” in Imagining Rome: British Artists in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael Liversidge and Catharine Edwards, 60–61. An example of this John William Waterhouse’s The Remorse of Nero after the murder of his mother (1878) whose casualness belies the “gruesome shock” afforded by the title.

26. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Recreating Rome,” 68.

27. Jesse Benedict Carter, “A Decade of Forum Excavation and the Results for Roman History,” The Classical Journal 5, no. 5 (March 1910): 202-11, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3286845. Carter characterises the year 1870, the beginning of fifteen years of intense excavation, as the beginning of a “New Rome.”

28. Timothy Webb, “‘City of the Soul’: English Travellers to Rome,” (23, 34) in Imagining Rome. He notes the influence of the bath complex in its ruined state on Romantic poets like Shelley, visible in Joseph Severn’s 1845 portrait of the same poet.

29. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 177.

30. See Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 175 for an image of the Baths of Diocletian in the 19th century.

31. Christopher Wood, Olympian Dreamers; Victorian Classical Painters, 1860–1914 (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1983): 124.

32. Examples include A Favourite Custom (1909) or The Apodyterium (1886).

33. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 177.

34. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny, 276. In particular, the strigil is noted for its phallic appearance, and placement near the woman’s genitalia.

35. Pliny, Natural History, 34.61-5.

36. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 152. 

37. Juvenal, Satires 6.

38. Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.135-165.

39. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 150. 

40. Both the Seated Gladiator and the Eros figurine were unearthed in Rome. The former is now at the Palazzo Altemps and the latter in the Capitoline Museums. 

41. Psomiades, Femininity and Representations, 4–5: “As the century progresses [...] femininity becomes less reliable as a sign of privacy and the enclosed woman [...] gives way to the woman who courts public display.”

42. For the “Fallen Woman” trope in Victorian art, see Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood (London: Associated University Presses, 1987), 131–143.

43. Frederick Dolman, “Illustrated Interviews: LXVIII, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadmema,” Strand Magazine, Dec. 6 1899.

44. Peter Trippi, “All the World’s a Stage,” in Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity, ed. Peter Trippi and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Munich: Prestel, 2018), 174.

45. Trippi, “All the World’s a Stage,” 174.

46. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 212.

47. Frederick Dolman, “Illustrated Interviews: LXVIII, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadmema,” Strand Magazine, Dec. 6 1899. 

48. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity, 201.

49. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity, 203.

50. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity, 203.

51. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 214. 

52. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 214. Cf. Charles William Mitchell, Hypatia, 1885.

53. Casteras, Victorian Womanhood, 131.

54. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny, 40.

55. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 213.

56. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 218.

57. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 214.

58. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 210.

59. Barrow, “Theatre and Painting,” 225.

60. Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 1991), 137–138.

61. Davis, Actresses as Working Women, 139.

62. A. Marshall, “London Amusements,” Belgravia: A London Magazine 8 (December 1875), 197.

63. Marshall, “London Amusements,” 197.

64. Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinities, 178.

65. Davis, Actresses as Working Women, 143.

66. Davis, Actresses as Working Women, 143.

67. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 115.

68. Prettejohn, “Modern City of Ancient Rome,” 115.

69. Prettejohn, “Modern City of Ancient Rome,” 115.

70. Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinities, 171.

71. Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinities, 173-4.

72. Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinities, 173-4.

73. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny, 90.

74. Alma-Tadema explicitly references Horace’s poetry many times, notably in A Favourite Poet (1889) and Loves Votaries (1891), both of which incorporate text from Horace’s Odes into the painting itself.

75. In Satires 1.2, Horace states outright that in Rome, nil medium est—“There is no medium” (1.2.28).

76. Paul Allen Miller, “‘I Get Around:” Sadism, Desire and Metonymy on the Streets of Rome with Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal,” in The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory, ed. David H. J. Larmour and Diana Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 139.

77. Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinities, 188.

78. Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinities, 190.

79. Ebers, Lorenz Alma-Tadema, 58.

80. Ovid, A.A., 1.55-59: tot tibi tamque dabiit formosas Roma puellas, [...] aequore quot pisces, fronde tegentur avesm, / quot caelum stellas.

81. Miller, “On the Streets of Rome,” 153–4.

82. Ovid, A.A., 1.60: mater in Aeneae constitit urbe sui.

83. Katharina Volk, “Ars Amatoria Roman: Ovid on Love as a Cultural Construct,” in The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, ed. Steven Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 239.

84. Ovid, A.A., 1.99-100: spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae / ille locus casri damna pudoris habet.

85. Ovid, A.A., 1.139-140: proximus a domina nullo prohibente sedet; / iunge tuum lateri qua potes usque latus.

86. Sharon L. James, “Women Reading Men: The Female Audience of the Ars Amatoria,” The Cambridge Classical Journal 54 (2008): 136.

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