Memory Sees
For modern observers it is often challenging, if not impossible, to reconstruct the original meaning and significance of ancient public images which once played their roles in creating identity among members of social groups (Giuliani 1986: 15).
Did contemporary viewers face a similar challenge when coming across the images of Mars and Venus coupled at the temple of Mars Ultor? A text from an entirely different cultural context describing the blessing of altarpieces in Western Christianity before they became the objects of worship might hold an answer. As part of the standard element in the Roman ceremony, immediately after the opening invocation, the following passage reveals ‘that whenever we see them with our bodily eyes we may mediate upon them with the eyes of our memory, and imitate their deeds and their holiness' (ritual romanum, tit. 8, cap. 25, after Freedberg 1989: 89-90).This view leaves no doubt that, first, memory can see. According to the German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘we only see what we know'. According to him, the word to know implies the meaning of to remember. Once we have seen something, we are able to remember what it is and we are able to recall these memories at some later point even if we do not see it regularly. The United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart coined the well-known catchphrase ‘I know it when I see it' when applying his ‘threshold test' for pornography in 1964. Although such an approach can hardly be described as concrete, it does point to the fact that our memory serves well enough to be challenged even in stressful situations, reliable and undeviating.
Second, images seem to have been regarded as memory aids and to encourage the beholder to act in similar ways. Also in ancient Rome, memory was able to see although with the intention to arrive at different results: here, the beholder was not asked to develop the virtus of Mars-the-Avenger but reflect on the mythical past which paved the way for Roman splendour during the age of Augustus. This conception is taken one step further by Thomas Aquinas who in his Commentarium super libros sententiarum: Commentum inlibrum III (dist.
9, art. 2, qu. 2-3) - possibly basing himself on Horace (Ars Poetica 180-2) - defined a threefold institution of images in churches: first, images are to instruct the unlettered; second, they help to allow the mystery of Incarnation to remain in ‘our memory by daily represented to our eyes; and third, images trigger emotions that are more effectively excited by things that one sees rather than only hears about. If indeed pictures are rousing emotions and reinforcing memory more efficiently than words, it becomes evident why images of pharaoh smiting his enemies at the entrances into Egyptian temples became so iconic. Whether or not purely political images equally amplified emotions as did religious images is difficult to say; history books are full of potentates which used massive amounts of images only to trigger emotional reactions that led to a Führerkult, in some cases even including semi-religious elements. On a more balanced level, both in ancient Egypt and Rome, where rulers were treated as sacred kings, political and true religious meaning became intertwined and religious empathic emotions carried the beholder away to marvel at the political meaning behind those images. The sites on which these images were publicly displayed were meeting points for groups that expressed ‘a collective shared knowledge... in which a group's sense of unity and individuality is based' (Assmann 1988: 15), which turned these places into sites of memory (Winter 2010).