By
Allen Ward
Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut, Storrs
Mary Beard never shies away from challenging the communis opinio. After you read her Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, you will never look at a representation of a Roman Emperor, or other famous Roman, in the same way again. A number of ClassConn members previewed the book’s themes when they attended Beard’s Rostovtzeff Lecture, “The Twelve Caesars: Fictions, Fakes, Memory, and Misunderstandings from the Renaissance to Now,” at Yale in 2016. It was part of a ten-year-long project that began in 2011 at the National Gallery of Art with her contribution to the A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, “The Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from Ancient Rome to Salvador Dali,” Like her lectures, the resulting book is full of prodigious learning relieved by her sharp wit and puckish humor.
For example, we learn not only that the one Renaissance artist ever named in Shakespeare’s works is Giulio Romano of Mantua (p.158) but also that another Mantuan, Ippolito Andreasi, from whose sketches we can reconstruct some of Romano’s lost works, was an “unfortunate soul, murdered by his wife’s lover in 1608 and since then largely forgotten” (p.161). We also learn that, in addition to Little Caesar’s Pizza, other products have crassly capitalized on the names and images of the Caesars: How about Augustus beer and chocolate coins or Nero matches and men’s boxer shorts? When referring to a set of twelve sixteenth-century dining chairs, each carved with the head of one of the canonical “Twelve Caesars,” Beard drolly comments that “the question of which guest would be seated on Caligula or Nero must have added excitement to the placement” (p. 18).
Augustus Prima Porta
The great problem with images of the Caesars is that, aside from the official profiles on their coinage, there is very little reliable evidence on which to base them. Official profiles are liable to be idealized, and it is difficult to render an accurate, fully-rounded face from a coin profile and some sketchy descriptions in Suetonius or other ancient author. Aside from the idealized statue of Augustus from Livia’s villa at Prima Porta and other ancient busts or statues closely resembling it, there are few reliably identified ancient busts or statues of Roman emperors, particularly of the first twelve. Beard thoroughly discredits or casts serious doubt upon most of the busts that our textbooks have confidently labelled as a particular Roman emperor or other famous Roman. It turns out that without authentic ancient labels, busts have been misidentified, badly restored, cobbled from disparate ancient and modern parts, or totally faked.
Pseudo-Vitellius; Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado
A prime example is the supposed bust of Vitellius purportedly excavated in Rome in the early sixteenth century and acquired by Cardinal Grimani of Venice. This bust is now believed to be of an unknown Roman from the second century AD. For centuries, however, it was considered genuine and was sketched and copied by artists who incorporated it into their own works. Some of these works seemed to have nothing to do with Roman imperial history but, in keeping with one of Beard’s major themes, are examples of the “unexpected ways in which the story of Roman emperors adds meaning to works of art (p. 34). The images of Roman emperors do not have to be ancient or authentic to be important.
From Camerini dei Cesari
A major case in point is Beard’s long discussion of a series of paintings originally in the Ducal Palace of Federico Gonzaga in Mantua. The palace was designed by Giulio Romano. One of its rooms, the Camerino dei Cesari, housed portraits of the first eleven Caesars by Titian and subsidiary paintings made by Romano. Much of what we know of the room, its paintings, and their arrangement comes from drawings made by both the unlucky Ippolito Andreasi and, later. Bernadino Campi. Campi used his drawings to paint multiple copies of Titian’s “Eleven” while adding his own Domitian to complete the canonical Suetonian “Twelve.”
Titian painted his “Eleven” between 1536 and 1539. There is no evidence that Gonzaga or Titian ever intended to round out the Suetonian “Twelve” by including Domitian. Beard speculates that the omission of Domitian, the last emperor of the Flavian dynasty, suggested dynastic continuation, an idea that would appeal to Gonzaga (p. 169). I might also comment that ending with the famously popular Titus, whose triumphal arch still stood in Rome, would have had welcome implications for the ambitious Federico. By 1628, however, Domitian had been added to Titian’s “Eleven” when the ill-fated Charles I of England acquired the Caesars and other works in Federico’s palace from the Gonzaga family in its decline. Who painted the Domitian that came with the Titians is still a mystery. The important point is that the paintings from Mantua and their copies had become the standards for depicting Suetonius’ twelve Caesars in subsequent European art and were the inspiration for other sets of twelve emperors different from them.
By combing fascinating art-historical research, Beard deftly traces the uses and dispositions of the twelve portraits from Mantua among Charles’ royal properties while he was alive and then after his execution until they were sold to Philip IV of Spain and sent to Madrid in 1652. There, they were hung in the Real Alcazar palace. Unfortunately, the paintings perished in a great fire in 1734 (p. 179), but all was not lost. Copies by Campi and other painters survived, and one of their sets (whose is not known) had been replicated in somewhat modified form in a series of engravings made by Aegidius Sadeler in the 1620s. The engravings are reproduced on p. 153 without the added Domitian. An appendix contains the texts and Beard’s translations of the anonymous and notoriously difficult Latin poems that formed biographical sketches under each of the emperors depicted, including the added Domitian
Emperor Augustus; engraving by Aegidius Sadeler
Further detective work brilliantly reconstructs ten large now-lost tapestries that were made by the Belgian weaver van Aelst for Henry VIII’s palace at Hampton Court (pp. 199-212). In keeping with one of her major themes, she says that there were “many classical allusions in these tapestries that have been forgotten, misread, or mistranslated” (p. 202). She argues convincingly that the scenes in these tapestries must have come from the poet Lucan’s anti-monarchical Pharsalia. They and a number of paintings at Hampton Court “were prompting a dialogue between a negative, or ambivalent, presentation of Roman imperial power and the power of the modern king” (p.211), a theme that she explores in many other works down to the present.
Engraving by Aegidius Sadeler