ABSTRACT
‘Qualis artifex pereo’, said the Emperor Nero as he contemplated suicide: ‘What an artist dies in me’ (Suetonius, Nero 49, 1; Momigliano, 1934, 741). Our concept of the artist is rather different from what the Romans understood by artifex. The effects of the Renaissance and the Romantic movement divide us inescapably from the time when little distinction was made between artist and artisan. To the Romans artifex described, not only the creator of an original work of art, as we would call it, but also anyone who practised an ars, anyone who did work which ‘required a specific technical knowledge and possibly a particular aptitude’ (Calabi-Limentani, 1958, 9–15). Furthermore, artifex described both the artist who made a living from his art, and one who practised it for pleasure; no explicit distinction was made between amateur and professional, for example, by Pliny in his discussion of various painters. Nero, like several later emperors, practised painting and sculpture; in that sense, he could fairly describe himself as ‘artifex’, however vain he might have been about his abilities as a performing artist on stage at Olympia and elsewhere.
