The Concert of Parts: Origins and Revolutions of the Trophy

Abstract

In Archaic Greece, the outcome of a battle was decided when one side admitted defeat by requesting permission to retrieve its dead. Once granted, the victor erected at the tropē—the point at which the enemy was routed—a tropaion or ‘trophy.’ This anthropomorphic assemblage of despoiled armour served as a sign of victory but was left to decay along with the enmity it embodied. To mark the Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, the trophy form was adapted as part of the first monument in Europe. After the erection of several such trophies, and their appearance in art and literature, the trophy became a symbol of power that was reinvented by the Romans and, after yet another reinterpretation, by Roman Christianity. The trophy was revived early in the Renaissance as part of triumphal allegory, and by the Counter-Reformation the multiple and contradictory origins of the ancient trophy had coalesced into a genealogy of the monument that doubled as a theory of the image. Given the role of imagination in the Aristotelean model of the mind, this approached a model of thought itself. Elaborated and diversified by the culture of hieroglyphs and the imagistic topoi of artificial memory, trophies served the interests of political-military power, but by passing through a different face of the same prism of an ‘exemplarity’ they were able to mark the triumph of a newer culture of technology. In France, the trophy was adopted by the Bourbon kings as a symbol of the sovereignty they worked at extending and that reached its apogee in the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. Emerging from the saturation of trophy ornament on military and technological themes during the reign of the Sun King, an alternative nobiliary culture inspired the fashioning of trophies in a ‘modern taste’ broadly pastoral in tone and serial in form. As well as a manner in decoration, this style was a social performance, an ideal of self and society, and a model of the mind to which the trophy forms it cultivated were perfectly suited. Despite its long and eventful history, the trophy has not been studied synchronically as an important phenomenon in eighteenth-century ornament, or diachronically as a deeply rooted and dynamic presence in European visual culture. This thesis attempts to account for the trophy on both terms.