Portraits of the Four Tetrarchs

Now as Rome continues to suffer, we see a move to something called the Tetrarchy. We'll get to that in a second. So a man by the name of Diocletian will come to power, and in 293, he establishes something called the Tetrarchy. Basically, he splits the empire into four distinct districts. And each of these districts is ruled over by a separate emperor, either junior emperor or a senior emperor. The senior emperors are known as Augustus, Augustus of the East and Augustus of the West. The more junior emperors are known as Caesar of the East and Caesar of the West. No news on whether or not they invented a salad at the time. And this is tricky because the idea is that you should have four equal partners in all of this. But as we know, sharing that kind of power frequently doesn't work. But artistically, what they do is they create this sculpture, this portrait of the four Tetrarchs, which I'm showing off on the left, and then we see it on the right. And the four Tetrarchs are these four Caesars. Today it's in Venice, Italy. And we see the quality of sculpture really has declined dramatically. The senior Augustuses and the junior Caesars are pretty much, as you see, identical. The only thing separating them is facial hair. The Augustuses have facial hair, the Caesars do not. But they're of equal height and they have identical outfits. They're also unusual. They're almost stubby when you look at their proportions. The heads are too big. The bodies are suddenly very blocky and not very human anymore. The legs are simply standing there straight. There's no sense of contrapposto. We know that there are better artists in the world, but they aren't working for the Romans at this point because things have become unstable, even though the fall of Rome won't happen for another 170 years, it's still apparent that things are definitely on the decline. When you look at the clothing, you'll notice it's all patterned. When you look at, for example, the drapery or how this cloak drapes on each figure, you'll notice that it's identical in every case and it's simply an issue of repeating the same line over and over again. They're not really looking at models. They're not looking at human beings anymore. So it's as if we've dropped back to archaic Greece or earlier in terms of the style and in terms of their artistic ability. They're also deadpan. There is absolutely no sense of emotion on these faces whatsoever. And there are other key problems here. For example, the eyes aren't quite right. The noses seem misshapen and the mouths seem misplaced, if nothing else.