Resumen de Embodied ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus
This essay re-examines the most iconic of Rome's first emperor: the Augustus from Prima Porta. Much has been written about the iconography of the statue's cuirass, its relationship with other portraits, and above all about question of date, display and prototype. By contrast, the present essay begins with the paradoxes embodied in the breastplate: as visual device, the cuirass allowed Augustus at once to expose a chiselled chest and cover it up. Such figurative tensions can be contextualized within contemporary dialectics of the body: on one side, "Greek" associations between nudity and power; on the other, a "Roman" reticence about the artificiality of that visual language. Like the figures depicted in and on the make-believe cuirass, the statue of Augustus fluctuates between literal and symbolic modes: ambiguity proves central to the slips and slides of viewing the statue, and to the mechanics of Augustan image-making at large.
