London,

Hadrian and the hordes

By Brian Sewell, Evening Standard  25.07.08

Last week the British Museum was proclaimed by The Times, that ancient thunderer of truth, to be "the greatest museum on earth". If by greatest is meant the most overwhelmingly confusing, the most frustratingly congested, the most illogically designed (if, indeed, designed at all), and altogether the most unassimilable, its bells and whistles those of the London railway terminus on a Bank Holiday, then no sane man should disagree. I, in my insanity however, am inclined to think that the quality of the experience there has diminished in precise proportion to the increasing number of its visitors, and that if the latest tally of six million were halved, then three million might again derive some instruction and enjoyment in exploring the swarming bowels of this blowsy old lady of Bloomsbury. The museum was first opened in 1759; many of these problems were apparent within a century and were relieved in 1881 when the departments of natural history were removed to South Kensington, a drastic division of a kind that the present trustees should consider now, and urgently, if conditions in the museum are ever again to be tolerable for the seriously enquiring visitor.

I raise these points because I had the privilege of seeing the museum's new exhibition, devoted to the Emperor Hadrian, alone but for the carpet-layers. In tranquillity I contemplated sculptures that range from the masterpiece to the grotesque, pondered over models and constructions, read the instruction panels and came to terms with a great man of Roman history (and therefore ours), his triumphs, quirks and flaws. But when I left the domed Reading Room that is the exhibition hall inherited from the Chinese terracotta warriors, it was to descend into the mayhem maelstrom of the Great Court and have my meditative mood cut short, all reflection swept away by the heaving tide of bodies and the uproar that they make. As much as any Bragg or Yentob, I care about the nation's cultural education, about the introduction of the young to art and history, but I believe profoundly that we have entered upon a period when the number of visits to an exhibition-is mistakenly and boastfully esteemed as a greater good than the quality of their experience. My impression from repeated visits to the National Gallery's Titian and Raphael exhibitions and to the British Museum's Michelangelo Drawings was that these were physical and intellectual torment for all who wanted to learn from them or simply enjoy their beauty - and that is not how it should be. That the British Museum should attract more visitors than Blackpool's Pleasure Beach is remarkable, but crowds are a wayward constituent of the pleasure of experience in the one, and utterly destructive of it in the other.

A month ago few of us could have put a date to Hadrian or set him accurately in the order of Roman emperors, but so effective has been the British Museum's recent propaganda that he has become the prattle of scribblers in newspapers and the quidnuncery of the Islington dinner. There and in Notting Hill everyone now knows how good an emperor he was, how he trimmed ungovernable edges of the empire, consolidated its core economies, built a wall to exclude the Scottish Nationalists, withdrew his armies from what is now Iraq and greatly benefited from a trade in oil of the renewable variety - olive oil in terracotta amphorae. Oh, holding a mirror to our times, what a contemporary emperor this was - and queer to boot, or at the very least bisexual and not in the least ashamed of it. These parallels may seem significant to the naïve, but they are irrelevant-Hadrian was wholly a man of his time, not ours, and any dictator we might set up as an example from our day, Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu and the tyrants of the Middle East, is a transitory ninepin in comparison, for what Hadrian achieved politically in the two decades of his rule had lasting influence-for two centuries and more, and his architectural legacy has lived on for almost two millennia - the dome of the British Museum's Reading Room, a creation of the 1850s, though all but invisible in the gloom that lurks over the clutter of the exhibition, is itself an exhibit, spawned by the great dome of Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome, of which there is an intriguing model.

There is also a model of Hadrian's villa at Tivoli - more palace, seat of government and small town than a villa in the English or Venetian sense, its scale astonishing, the rapidity with which it was constructed even more so, the design and quality of execution more so still - "breathtakingly unexpected" the opinion of the exhibition's curator. For much of it there was no precedent, but just as much of it became the precedent for architectural fantasy and garden ornament up to the present day; to the ancient Romans it must have seemed an eighth wonder of the world, and for us it deserves to be one of the first seven.

How much of it was Hadrian's own invention? In one of my surviving schoolbooks it is described as "a vast villa in which were reproduced on a smaller scale the finest buildings he had seen on his travels", but this is fanciful; certainly he travelled to almost every province of his empire, but surely only in Italy, Greece, Egypt and distant Hellenistic cities could he have seen buildings at which he and we might wonder, but in none of these was there a precedent for his two great inventions in Rome itself, the Pantheon and the Castel Sant'Angelo, which was originally Hadrian's mausoleum. Away from Rome so much - 121-125 and 128-132 his longest unbroken stints abroad in his 21 years as emperor - he can have supervised neither the dramatic architectural transformation of his capital, nor every detail of the villa, which, to a great extent, must have grown haphazardly; nevertheless, he must at each stage of this growth either have had very clear ideas of its revised extent and purposes and communicated these to his architects, or, like Hitler, have allowed them freedom to put flesh on his broadly imagined bones. The model of the villa is supported by photographs in the catalogue, by architectural fragments and by examples of the sculpture with which it was embellished.

To a considerable extent the villa, by then well advanced, became a monument to Antinous, the beautiful Greek boy to whom Hadrian had been devoted for perhaps as long as seven years, who drowned in the Nile in October 130. "Hadrian was gay." With this announcement the curator trivialises their relationship. There was no concept of gaiety in ancient Rome, no concept of homosexuality; it was then assumed that men buggered beardless boys as a matter of course (an assumption by which the fathers of young English Grand Tourists were still alarmed in the 18th century), and the general rule was that the boys would, in their turn as adults, continue the practice. Pederasty was the custom of the day and condemnation was reserved only for adult men who chose to be the passive partners in sodomy. This was perhaps the crucial point for Antinous. "He drowned himself," my schoolbook declares. Why? Because, at his age, his role as boy was no longer socially acceptable? The date of his death he shared with the Egyptian god Osiris who, according to one legend, also drowned in the Nile - was this coincidence, or could it have been sacrifice in accordance with some esoteric belief to which Hadrian gave credence (Osiris was immortal in his after-life)? Was death merely a tragic accident, or could Hadrian, driven by some jealous logic, have ordered it? Suetonius records that Domitian, emperor when Hadrian was young, took a favourite steward to his bed one night, wined, dined and buggered him, and then had him crucified next morning - so all things are possible in this conjecturing. Suetonius lived long enough to write a life of his contemporary Hadrian but, alas, stopped short and in safety with Domitian.

From what we see of Antinous in the exhibition he was, as a boy, of an ideal beauty familiar to every ancient Greek and Roman, to Italian Renaissance painters and Victorian pederasts, the perfect Tadzio for Aschenbach - and as a man in the posthumous guise of Osiris Renatus simply astonishing in a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sense. The Vatican has lent its over life-size statue of the adult Antinous by an ancient Roman sculptor who achieved a perfect stylistic blend of the hierarchical Egyptian and the then modern Roman realism, eroticised, the nipples proud, a slight bulge of plump flesh over rhe linen garment round his hips, the swelling buttocks staminal and just enough of a genital prominence as to still be subtle. If this is Antinous at 20, could the exquisitely disciplined relief of an unidentified Youth Taming a Horse, so Greek in idiom as to be more Greek than Greek, be an evocation of Antinous the boy with a passion for hunting when he first caught Hadrian's eye?

As for Hadrian himself, his sculpted image dominates the exhibition, from the grandeur of the colossal head just retrieved from burial at Sagalassus - a very damaged, derelict and, thankfully, unvisited site just south of Egridir in Turkey - to a grotesque caricature in bronze dredged from the Thames in 1834, misleadingly dramatised and made beautiful by a photographer working for the catalogue. As an aside, I am compelled to say that responsible institutions have a duty to ensure, in every case, that their photographers provide accurate records rather than examples of the photograph as art. In busts and heads Hadrian was served well enough in terms of likeness, moustached and bearded to camouflage a scarred skin, we think, seeming always grave of mien, though we need the gossip of Suetonius if we are to interpret his expressions, but in full-length statues disproportions and disjunctions (in one case amusingly evident) make him awkward and unconvincing as an emperor; at Hadrian nude, as Mars, his shaven scrotum a silk purse, his body a stock prop by a hack, even respectful ancient Romans must have tittered.

This is not in any sense an art exhibition; rather, it is a history lesson devoted to the life and times of a man who was the best of Roman emperors, in which the antique drainpipe and the brick are peers for the portrait bust and the imperial full-length, the bibulous satyr and the beautiful catamite. Would that it were on view for a year, to be seen without the jostling shoulder and the jabbing elbow, but it ends on the first day of Ludi Victoriae Sullanae, the 26th day of October, and both will inflict their bruises on all who visit it. Departure, inevitably through the Great Court, is best treated as a Colosseum experience.

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict is at the British Museum (020 7323 8181, www.britishmuseum.org) until 26 October. Open daily 10am-5.30pm (last entry 4.20pm). Thursdays and Fridays until 8.30pm (last entry 7.20pm). Admission £12.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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