Lessons on Love

Jennifer Ledig Heuser (History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University)

Love as Destiny and Dynasty: Paris and Helen at Pompeii

The story of Paris and Helen has long occupied the popular imagination as a metaphor for love and desire. Paris is awarded Helen’s love when he judges Aphrodite the most beautiful of goddesses, and the power of that love ultimately triggers a rift in the social order and the catastrophe of the Trojan War. We owe this understanding to the Homeric literary tradition, in which the lovers steal away from banquets to feast upon each other, and in which the goddess Aphrodite imbues the couple with a tangible, physical desire.

Paris and Helen were also among the most popular themes in Imperial Roman painting. Given the focus that literature places on the desire inherent in their relationship, one would expect the visual depictions of the pair to quite literally embody their physical attraction to each other. Indeed, no period in the history of images was more receptive to open depictions of physical desire: erotic images pervade all forms of Roman art, from silverware to statuary to the painted pictures identifying cubbyholes in Roman baths.

Yet early imperial images of Paris and Helen do not even hint at their desire for one another. Instead, an examination of all known first-century paintings on this theme finds their pairing always presented as two equals joining forces in an almost ridiculously chaste manner. Paintings of the couple inevitably call to mind the formal Roman portraits of couples with arms entwined in the dextrarum junctio, or dynastic statuary groups that prominently feature couples. In these paintings, the love between Paris and Helen became politicized rather than eroticized, and this paper explores two underlying reasons for the surprising way that Romans employed the theme. One is that it legitimizes Augustus’ own act of taking for himself another man’s wife. And ultimately it embodies Rome’s own dynastic intentions, forging a stable bond between the dynastic history of Troy with the cultural and artistic legacy of Greece.

Janet Stephens (Art History, UC Los Angeles)

Love and Death: History and the Ambivalence of Peruvian Creole Identity in Luis Montero’s Funerals of Atahualpa

Love, recognized as a powerful emotion guiding and effecting human behavior, is rarely discussed outside of the bounds of interpersonal relationships. But what role do such emotions play in broader human experience? And how is this reflected in artistic production? Benedict Anderson argues that love is the fundamental expression of nationalism in the arts. It is only through such positive emotions as love that individuals of various ethnicities, classes and genders can join together in the ‘imagined community’ of a nation. This paper will examine the role of love in Luis Montero’s Los funerales de Atahualpa, the first postcolonial Peruvian history painting by a Peruvian artist.

Completed in 1867, Los funerales de Atahualpa depicts a scene from the Spanish Conquest wherein the Spanish conquistadors pay homage to the deceased Inca emperor. The moment it chooses to immortalize, and the manner in which it portrays it, is significant. The painting locates the nation’s history in an act of love and admiration rather than (or perhaps within) one of antagonism and defeat. Both major ethnic groups in Peru’s national consciousness, the indigenous and the Spaniard, are given a positive role in the construction of the contemporary nation. It thus conforms to Anderson’s claim that nationalist sentiments are rooted in love.

Such sentiments of love, however, risked shifting the balance of power in contemporary political relations, which rested on a racist discourse of European superiority. Indeed, although the painting seemingly presents a harmonious vision of Peru’s past, it was produced during a climate of political disunity and animosity, a tension that is revealed in a close examination of the work. Rather than being an unmediated expression of national unity, love is an emotion around which the ambivalence of the people’s actions within a defined national space revolve. This produces a fundamental tension that problematizes the national narrative, identified by Homi Bhabha as the split space between pedagogy and performance. Montero’s painting, while an expression of the pedagogy of nationalist love, reveals the tensions of hate, in the form of racial and class discourse that influenced the performance of national identity for both the artist and the contemporary viewing public.

 

Arden Stern (Visual Studies; UC Irvine)

The Fatal Dart: Love, Marks, and a Future by Design

With regard to 20th-century print advertising practice in Europe and the United States, historians often trace an increasing graphical reliance on the mnemonic image— or, as baptized by certain contemporaneous advertising pundits, “the fatal dart.” My paper, as part of a larger ongoing project, will use this term as a springboard for an investigation of “Lovemarks,” an advertising strategy adopted by the Saatchi & Saatchi
agency in 2000. Lovemarks are defined by Saatchi & Saatchi as “super-developed brands that inspire loyalty beyond reason.” As a more general branding strategy, lovemarks resemble an affliction—much like Cupid’s arrow. The lovemarked consumer, fluctuating between the roles of the stricken Apollo and the chaste Daphne, is not simply the resultant archetype of an advertising heritage inspired by psychoanalysis and market
research. Instead, such roles indicate a direct mythological and moral precedent for contemporary consumer practice. The fatal dart of contemporary branding practice is an appeal to consumer faith—or blind faith—in ideals rather than a desire for commodities.

As an embryonic advertising methodology, lovemarks indicate an atavistic turn in the consumer sphere, particularly on the part of corporations seeking relevance on a larger cultural scale. This atavism has both political and social implications, which I explore by unraveling the visual and textual devices that identify an image as a lovemark. Such an image, as a spiritual icon, suggests a decidedly contemporary twist on the apotheosis of branded commodities. By conflating the sacred, the emotional, and the moral, corporations and designers employ ancient innuendos in the service of both inspiring and defining devotion. The lovemark is not a new version of the brand so much as a direct acknowledgment and standardization of this fusion.