Decline & Fall- Rome, Orgies and the Decadent West

Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888)

The image of decadent Rome is constantly present in the works of Lorenz Alma-Tadema. In an 1883 lecture on the current styles of art in Britain, the art-critic John Ruskin criticised Alma-Tadema for making it his “heavenly mission to portray” Rome in its “last corruption […] and its Bacchanalian frenzy” (The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, 1884, 103). Ruskin was not mistaken in his analysis of the time frame of much of the painter’s work: the vast majority of Alma-Tadema’s historical scenes focus on the late-Imperial period of Rome. For example, in 1871 he painted A Roman Emperor, depicting a member of the praetorian guard bowing to a terrified Claudius, with the murdered body of the assassinated Caligula, his nephew and predecessor, sprawled close by. The Roses of Heliogabalus from 1888 shows the emperor Heliogabalus showering his dinner guests with rose petals, resulting in many being smothered to death- or so legend claims; his reign was brief as a result of his alleged excesses. The artist’s Unconscious Rivals (1893) began as a painting of the ceiling of Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House) in Rome. Alma Tadema’s 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 the latter’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.”

Alma Tadema, A Roman Emperor, 1871

Gibbon’s famous history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire– in which he argued that successive emperors’ hedonism and cruelty brought about the decadence and decline of the once-great Rome- is clearly echoed in Alma-Tadema’s canvases. He seldom chose to depict incidents or scenes from the positively-viewed Republican or Augustan eras; rather, it was Rome’s worst rulers, and the dissolution and cruelty of their reigns, which characterised Alma-Tadema’s Roman world. This was a deliberate turn against the idea of exempla virtutis, the moralistic view of earlier history painting which called for inspiring examples to be presented to the public.

Caracalla & Geta, 1909

I have mentioned before that French artist Thomas Couture first came to public attention with a painting of Rome during the Decadence (1847). The Polish-born painter, Henryk Siemiradzki (1843-1902) had close connections to Ukraine but spent a large part of his life studying and painting in Rome. He too painted classical scenes, both mythology and incidents in everyday life, but he also specialised in incidents from Polish and Russian history and from the Bible. Nero’s Torches (1876) combines Biblical history with neo-classicism by showing the Imperial court assembled to watch some Christian martyrs being incinerated; Christian Dirce (1897) shows a scene in the Colosseum, in which an opulent looking but thuggish emperor inspects the corpse of a Christian woman who was lashed to a bull before it was pitted against gladiators. Both have perished, it seems; the original Dirce was the Greek queen of Thebes who, according to myth, mistreated her niece, Antiope, and in revenge was killed by the latter’s sons by means of tying the queen to the horns of a bull.

Thomas Couture, Rome during the Decadence (1847)

An Orgy in the Time of the Caesars (1872) and Orgy on Capri capture the mood of the Rome of Edward Gibbons. We have the same nudity and inebriation that we see in Couture’s canvas, but with added menace. The brooding lighting of the palace in the 1872 painting suggests an obliviousness to the outside world; on Capri the bacchanal has brought cavorting revellers to the seashore, where they appear oblivious in their delirium to the corpses that have fallen down from the imperial villa above.

Siemiradzki, A Roman Orgy in the Time of Caesars, 1872

Siemiradzki, An Orgy of the Times of Tiberius on Capri, 1881

Rather like Siemiradzki, fellow Pole Wilhelm Kotarbiński (1848-1921) trained in Rome and worked for many years in Kyiv. He painted many scenes set in imperial Rome and Egypt, many exuding a sense of luxurious and indulgent lassitude; his orientalist images of courtesans in the seraglio are saturated with a comparable mood of bored carnality. Most striking, perhaps, is Kotarbiński’s orgy scene, a canvas that depicted some of the stereotypes of decadent Rome. From the 1890s, the painting is replete with the signifiers of doomed extravagance, the nudes, the wine, the flowers, the hints of sex. 

For readers of a certain age, there may of course be a certain staid familiarity to some of these images- especially that of Claudius and the murdered Caligula- because they are all highly reminiscent of the BBC version of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which was first broadcast in 1976. The series’ orgies were all very respectable affairs, with the dissolution of participants mainly marked by eating grapes straight off the bunches held above their heads (it seemed). Pretty tame stuff, especially when compared to the HBO’s Rome…

Kotarbiński, A Roman Orgy

Orgies are good fun to paint, of course; the artist can indulge himself in nudes and rich fabrics whilst showing off his skills in convincingly depicting candle and torch light.  Nonetheless, I wonder if there are political undertones in some of these paintings as well. Certainly, Couture’s critique of Roman decadence was painted just a year before the 1848 revolution that toppled the Bourbon monarchy of Louis Philippe and the picture was understood by contemporaries to be a veiled attack on the crown. The Pole Kotarbiński could well have felt little affection for the Russian empire, partly as a result of native nationalism and partly because of the time he spent living in Ukraine- most notably when the Red Army invaded in 1919. He might well have welcomed the fall of the Romanovs in 1917. I am less convinced of this thesis in respect of Siemiradski, given that he spent many time studying in St Petersburg and the fact that many of his canvases hang in Russian galleries.

Part of the unspoken context of the artistic (and literary) orgies I have been discussing is the understanding that they were an indulgence of an elite. Only the rich and powerful can afford to stage them; only the rulers of society can command the slaves, servants and courtesans needed to entertain guests; only the privileged and connected can overcome any problems arising from participants getting overexcited and carried away- or, for that matter, can conduct themselves like this without serious reputational damage. Immunity from prosecution is ensured by status and wealth. It was in just such settings that the Marquis de Sade situated works such as Justine, Juliette, Philosophie dans le Boudoir and 120 Days of Sodom. Nobles and high-ranking churchmen are depicted kidnapping, tormenting, raping and murdering the young, the poor and the vulnerable, indulging their perverted tastes without consequence. Editions of his books issued during the Marquis’ lifetime were illustrated by Claude Bornet; his etchings show mixed groups of up to fifteen people copulating, beating and torturing each other- illustrations far more orgiastic than anything we’ll find in oils on canvas. 

However, in the aftermath of the First World War, it may be argued that orgies and decadence became democratised. The horrors inflicted on the ordinary population in the first major war of mechanised destruction and slaughter appear to have led to a reaction- a wish to celebrate survival and to indulge the senses. The hedonistic Paris and Berlin of the 1920s are examples of this new mood- a rejection of politics and an embrace of personal liberation and pleasure. Arguably, this is reflected in the art of the period as well. 

The very obscure and pseudonymous French illustrator ‘Fameni Leporini’ produced portfolios that depicted large and feverish group sex scenes. Next to nothing is known about the identity or biography of this artist; it is assumed he was born in the late 1880s or early 1890s, as he became active as a designer in the ’20s and ’30s. Some of his work seems very clearly to have been designed to illustrate de Sade’s books (the best fit would be the second part of The One Hundred and Twenty days of Sodom)– or at least was composed in response to the marquis’ writings: monks feature amongst the figures in a number of scenes. Other designs may well be the products of Leporini’s imagination, elaborating on some of the themes I have discussed; one of his series of prints was even titled La grande orgie (The Big Orgy).  As other commentators on his work have observed, determining with certainty whether Leporini always depicted consensual activities, perhaps mixed with a little mutual S&M, or was portraying something more violent, is not always easy to say- especially in the mass scenes of writhing flesh that characterise his output. Given Leporini’s probable age, he is very likely to have seen service during the First World War. I speculate whether the damage inflicted upon many men’s psyches by these experiences may be part of the explanation as to why there was the marked boom in novels and illustrations depicting spanking and flogging that occurred in Paris after 1919 (see, for example, the work of Carlo featured previously). 

The German illustrator Otto Schoff was able to undertake work similar to Leporini’s in Berlin during the 1920s, such as his Orgien (‘Orgies’) of 1924, a collection of ten lithographs in which every sexual combination seems to feature (even including pets).  Die Liebesspiele der Venus (The Love Games of Venus) appeared in the same year, in which Schoff once again explored identical themes: one orgy even seems to be taking place in a nursery.  Comparable family orgies may be found in Jules Pascin’s Erotikon of 1933. In these artists’ imaginations, all restrictions and boundaries seem to have broken down. Far worse, for sure, can be read in accounts of Emperor Tiberius and others, but space and time distanced those events and transformed them into curiosities about which audiences felt safe. Bringing identical behaviours into contemporary settings seems to have been more challenging to viewers, the artists thereby raising provocative questions about violence, pleasure, state power, personal liberty and the illogical mismatch between what’s lawful and permissible (mass killing) and what’s prohibited (mass copulation)…

Further reading might include Burgo Partridge’s History of Orgies (2017) or, perhaps, A Photographic History of Orgies (2020) by Alexandre Dupouy, whose study of Paris- City of Pleasure, I have previously reviewed. For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my book Cherry Ripe on my publications page.

Otto Schoff, Girls’ Friendship, 1920