The overwhelming experience of art in early modern England was of shattered objects, of artifacts damaged and despoiled by the iconophobia unleashed during the Protestant Reformation. Taking this circumstance as its premise, my essay examines the image of Antony as the Colossus of Rhodes in Antony and Cleopatra. Both the statue itself, with which Antony is identified, and the architectural rubble to which it had been reduced by an earthquake, had long vanished by the time Shakespeare was writing. As a tragic character, Antony follows the same trajectory as the Colossus, which in the early modern imagination, had become an object that was simultaneously whole and in pieces, its former magnitude even more staggering when considered from its fallen state. This is significant because Roman dominion is understood in this play as a quasi-architectural problem of size, amplification, perspective, and scale, and its political power is tested by the fundamentally aesthetic and anti-aesthetic mechanisms of enlargement and diminution. Shakespeare’s depiction of Antony as a hero in pieces, shows that the power of images – especially when they are scattered, splintered, broken, and incomplete – reveals itself most fully in the energy of fragmentation.
Dympna Callaghan (Wed,) studied this question.