Lawrence Alma-Tadema And The Problem Of Painting Rome Too Clearly
- henrydaviscc
- 6 hours ago
- 10 min read
A friend sent me Lawrence Alma-Tadema's (1836-1912) The Triumph of Titus: AD 71, The Flavians (1885). At first glance it looks like exactly what you’d expect from him: immaculate surfaces, the crisp pleasure of antique detail, and a Roman world that feels less “ancient history” than “walk straight into it.”
Then you look again.
Because what Alma-Tadema gives us here is not merely a well-researched slice of antiquity. It’s a visual theology of Roman power—and one that becomes rather hard to unsee once you place it next to how the Flavians sold themselves after the Jewish War.
The painting shows Titus returning in triumph after the capture of Jerusalem. Vespasian, in white, leads the procession; Titus follows; the Temple spoils are there—most notably the seven-branched menorah—and in the distance sits the Temple of Jupiter Victor, calmly underwriting the whole event with the message that Rome’s god has won.
That’s the official story, anyway.
But Alma-Tadema’s composition does something more ambitious: it makes the Flavians look not just victorious, but salvific.
A Quick Walkthrough
What The Painting Makes You Look At (In order)
Start at the top of the steps. Your eye is pulled to Vespasian, not Titus. He is the compositional centre: robed, calm, descending. Alma-Tadema positions him as the source of order, not merely a beneficiary of victory.
Now let your gaze drop slightly. The steps are not just architecture; they are stagecraft. The shadows create horizontal bands, like a set of bars laid across the scene. They slow the procession, control its rhythm, and make the descent feel ceremonial rather than hurried.
Then look to the lower centre. An attendant holds a staff that runs vertically through the composition. Put the staff together with the horizontal lines of the top darker shaded steps and you get a cruciform structure at the very point where the viewer’s attention naturally settles. This is geometry doing ideological work: legitimacy made to feel settled and secure.
Only now do you follow the movement to Titus, immediately behind Vespasian, and then to the objects that function as the painting’s theological punctuation: the sacred items from Jerusalem. The menorah is not incidental decoration; it is the visual proof that victory has become a transfer of divine favour.
Finally, let your eye go to the background architecture. The Temple of Jupiter Victor isn’t there to fill space; it completes the claim. The procession is framed as a religious settlement of history, not a temporary military episode.
Once you see the painting in that order—Vespasian, the staged descent, the cruciform axis, the spoils, the temple—the whole thing reads less like “antiquarian spectacle” and more like a carefully arranged statement about who now owns the world.
Vespasian As Quasi-Messiah (Yes, Really)
Start with Vespasian.
He is not rendered as a grizzled soldier-emperor, nor as a pragmatic administrator in the act of consolidating a coup. He is staged. He is robed in white—a colour that reads as purity, ritual authority, and almost priestly assurance. And he descends the steps with a kind of controlled revelation. Not rushing. Not striding. Appearing.
This is the crucial point: Alma-Tadema is not painting “a general who won.” He is painting “a ruler who inaugurates a new age.”
And that is very close to how Vespasian was sold in Flavian propaganda—most famously in The Jewish War, which reports an “ambiguous oracle” that many Jews took to mean a ruler from Judaea would rule the world, but which the work itself insists actually pointed to Vespasian, “appointed emperor in Judaea.”
Set this within the wider Flavian atmosphere: miracle stories around Vespasian’s healings circulate in elite literary tradition (The Annals, The Lives of the Caesars), while the regime’s coinage and public messaging relentlessly hammer the theme of restoration and cosmic reset. The Flavians did not merely win; they “saved” Rome from chaos, remaking order out of crisis.
Alma-Tadema paints that claim as if it were self-evidently true.
Titus As The Salvific Agent
Now look at Titus.
He follows immediately behind his father—and Alma-Tadema gives him one of those disarmingly domestic gestures that Victorian artists loved: he holds his daughter’s hand (dynasty, continuity, the future literally in tow). The effect is not “warrior in triumph” so much as “the man who secured tomorrow.”
And then come the spoils from Jerusalem: sacred objects made into trophies. This isn’t just military victory; it’s a transfer of meaning. If you want a visual way of expressing “divine favour has moved,” it’s difficult to do it more bluntly than parading a captured menorah through Rome. The Walters Art Museum's own description simply notes the elements of the scene, including the placement of Jupiter Victor in the background of the procession.
In other words, the painting doesn’t just depict the aftermath of Jerusalem’s fall. It depicts the theological claim that follows it: Rome’s order now stands where Jerusalem’s sacred centre stood.
Call it replacement theology in paint, if you like. The point is that the message is not subtle.
The Structure Modern Viewers Recognise as “Christian”
At this stage someone will object: “But you’re reading Christianity into a Roman painting.”
No. I’m pointing to something slightly more uncomfortable.
By the nineteenth century, the West was already steeped in Christian visual grammar. Even when artists paint pagan Rome, they often do so with compositional habits shaped by centuries of Christian art: the central descent, the legitimating architecture, the implied “new era,” the sense of providential choreography.
So when Alma-Tadema paints Vespasian like a redeemer inaugurating a world-renewal after Jerusalem’s destruction, it lands on modern eyes with a familiar resonance—even if the painter never wrote the word “messiah” in his notebook.
And that leads to the deeper issue: Flavian ideology and later Christian ideology occupy the same symbolic space. Not identical, not interchangeable—but structurally compatible.
A simple comparison shows why:
Vespasian as divinely favoured ruler → Jesus as divinely chosen messiah
A new era after Jerusalem’s fall → a new covenant after the Temple’s destruction
Salvation framed as order after catastrophe → salvation framed as cosmic renewal
Universal empire as the carrier of peace → universal Church as the carrier of truth
The painting doesn’t “prove” any of this historically. But it reveals how easily the pieces line up.
The Cross-Like Geometry (And Why It Matters)
That cross-like geometry is worth revisiting: the shadows of the steps intersected by the vertical line of the staff-bearing figure. This is not an exercise in seeing shapes for their own sake. It’s a question of how the composition guides the viewer’s sense of authority and legitimacy.
In the visual centre of the painting you have:
horizontal bands created by the steps and their shadows
a vertical line completed by the staff/sceptre held below
and the central axis of Vespasian’s descending figure
The result is cruciform geometry sitting right where Alma-Tadema wants your eye to settle: under Vespasian, anchoring him. Whether consciously intended or not, it does what crosses do in later visual culture: it stabilises legitimacy, centres authority, and implies a kind of sanctioned world-order.
And the staff-holder matters. In Roman iconography, a staff or standard is not a walking aid; it is authority made visible. In Christian iconography, the “soldier/standard-bearer” often serves a similar compositional role: the human instrument that completes the vertical axis of power.
If you want the blunt takeaway: the cross does not interrupt imperial ideology; it inherits its structure.
That’s why the image feels oddly “Christian” to modern eyes. Not because Alma-Tadema secretly coded Christianity into Rome, but because Christian triumphal symbolism is, in important ways, a recoding of imperial victory symbolism.
Why Alma-Tadema Was Sidelined
At this point we reach the second puzzle: if Alma-Tadema was so talented—and if his work is obviously based on serious study—why did he become a byword for bad taste?
We should be precise about what happened. Alma-Tadema was not censored. No one banned him. His work wasn’t destroyed. The more accurate word is marginalised: he slipped out of the “serious” story that twentieth-century art history wanted to tell about itself.
And the reasons weren’t primarily about quality. They were about what modernism needed to reject.
After the First World War, grand confidence in civilisation, empire, and coherent historical reconstruction looked, to many, either naïve or complicit. Modernist taste increasingly favoured fracture, irony, visible brushwork, and ambiguity. Alma-Tadema offered the opposite: polished certainty, immersive realism, and a Rome that functions—socially, architecturally, ideologically.
He made imperial power look not only real, but normal. That is precisely what later generations found awkward.
One vivid sign of how far his reputation had fallen is the story—often repeated—that The Finding of Moses was bought in the 1950s largely for the value of its frame. Whether every detail is true matters less than the fact that the story made sense at the time.
So Alma-Tadema was pushed aside not because he lacked skill, but because his paintings were awkward. They made empire look stable and attractive, and they made it too easy to see how the visual language later associated with Christianity fits comfortably inside Roman power.
The Return—Carefully Managed
Alma-Tadema’s reappearance in the later twentieth century is itself revealing. He returns when it becomes safe to enjoy him again—when modernism no longer needs to police the gates so aggressively, and when museums are willing to treat Victorian art as a period rather than a problem.
You can watch that shift in curatorial signals: exhibitions in the early 1970s at major institutions, a growing willingness to display him again, and then the 2010s boom in market value and museum-friendly rediscovery.
But notice the way he is often framed on the way back in: spectacle, surface, luxury, cinematic influence. All true. All safe. What is less often highlighted is the thing that makes his work intellectually sharp: his ability to paint the theology of empire without blinking.
He’s welcomed back—but often slightly defanged.
The Uncomfortable Parallel: Bauer, Encyclopaedia Biblica, And What Gets Classed As “Respectable”
What is striking is how often the same cultural move repeats across different fields. Someone produces a clear, unsettling account of origins—historical, textual, or ideological—and the response is rarely a direct refutation. Instead, the work is quietly reclassified: “not serious,” “fringe,” “kitsch,” “old-fashioned.” Institutions move on, and the uncomfortable clarity is placed safely to one side.
In biblical studies, the nineteenth century produced brutally confident critical work—work that treated sacred narratives as literature, as ideology, as products of elite culture rather than transparent reports. Bruno Bauer’s critiques of the Gospels (in Christ and the Caesars) appear in the early 1840s; he was removed from his teaching position amid controversy, less because of a lack of scholarly grounding than because his conclusions crossed newly hardening boundaries of acceptability.
Later, the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1899–1903), published by the University of Oxford, embodies a form of scholarship that is frank, philological, and—by modern standards—astonishingly unembarrassed about treating biblical material as a historical problem, not a devotional one.
Seen together, the sidelining of figures like Bruno Bauer, the uneasy reception of projects such as the Encyclopaedia Biblica, and the later downgrading of painters like Alma-Tadema point to a broader cultural shift: not a collapse of rigour, but a narrowing of what kinds of clarity institutions were willing to host.
There’s no need to imagine a single plot behind this. It reflects a wider moment when certain kinds of confidence—about Rome, about religion, about origins—stopped feeling comfortable.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Western culture repeatedly drew new lines around what kinds of clarity felt acceptable. This played out in art, in religion, and in how history was written. Victorian confidence—whether in presenting Rome as a working system, or in closely dissecting sacred texts—began to feel awkward. These approaches weren’t always argued down. Often, they were simply made unfashionable.
And “taste” is rarely neutral.
Alma-Tadema wasn’t unusual in this. Other hugely successful painters who treated the ancient world as something organised and intelligible met a similar fate. Jean-Léon Gérôme is the obvious comparison. In his own lifetime he was famous, technically admired, and taken seriously as someone who knew his antiquity. But as tastes changed in the twentieth century, that kind of clarity began to look unfashionable. Paintings that explained how ancient power worked started to feel uncomfortable, even old-fashioned.
What’s interesting is that this way of seeing Rome didn’t disappear. It just slipped out of the gallery and into popular culture. Early epic films borrowed heavily from painters like Gérôme and Alma-Tadema. When people picture ancient Rome today — the marble spaces, the processions, the sense of ritualised power — they are often seeing these painters second-hand, filtered through cinema. Museums hesitated. Film-makers did not. The visual language sidelined in galleries survived quite happily on screen.
Alma-Tadema helps make something else visible here. In debates about origins—historical or religious—some ways of telling the story are treated as acceptable not because they are better argued, but because they feel reassuring. They keep things familiar: neat categories, clear breaks, tidy moral stories.
Other approaches—especially those that draw attention to elite authorship, propaganda, institutional interests, or uncomfortable continuities between Roman power and later Christian meaning—tend to be dismissed before the evidence is even looked at. The modern word is “fringe.” In art history, it was “kitsch.” Different labels, same effect: the debate is quietly closed by deciding who sounds respectable enough to be listened to.
Why Alma-Tadema Still Matters
Alma-Tadema’s Triumph of Titus isn’t just there to be admired. It wants to be read. It presents Flavian victory as something ordered, meaningful, and almost inevitable. The emperor comes down the steps calmly, as if arriving rather than conquering. The spoils from Jerusalem are not treated as loot, but as signs that authority has changed hands. Jupiter Victor waits in the background, quietly confirming the point. Even the structure of the painting—the crossing lines formed by steps and staff—helps make power feel settled and legitimate.
This is why Alma-Tadema later became awkward. He didn’t paint Rome as a warning or a ruin. He painted it as a working system: confident, stable, and convinced of its own rightness. Twentieth-century taste could cope with Rome as something broken, or as colourful spectacle. What it found harder to live with was Rome shown as the source of ideas and images that later Western culture came to think of as uniquely “Christian.”
So Alma-Tadema wasn’t argued away; he was talked down. His work was labelled “Victorians in togas”, “decorative”, “kitsch”. Only once those habits loosened could he be looked at again—and even then, often as spectacle rather than challenge.
But the painting itself hasn’t changed. It keeps making the same point every time you look at it. Jerusalem’s fall is shown as the start of a new order. Imperial power is presented as a form of salvation. And the visual language that later generations learned to associate with the cross sits comfortably inside a Roman triumph.
That isn’t a romantic fantasy of the ancient world. It’s a reminder that some of the boundaries we draw between Rome and Christianity are much newer than we like to think.
For readers interested in Roman visual culture more broadly, Following Hadrian has recently explored related material from a complementary perspective.