Twelve caesars, p.1
Twelve Caesars, page 1
TWELVE CAESARS
THE TWELVE CAESARS
TWELVE CAESARS
IMAGES OF POWER FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD TO THE MODERN
MARY BEARD
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
THE A. W. MELLON LECTURES IN THE FINE ARTS
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON
Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Bollingen Series XXXV: 60
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Jacket art (front): Shutterstock, (back): Edition of Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, printed in Rome, 1470; the binding c. 1800, with Augsburg enamels c. 1690 after Sadeler’s Twelve Caesars inset into the inside front cover. Collection of William Zachs, Edinburgh. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s London.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beard, Mary, 1955- author.
Title: Twelve Caesars : images of power from the ancient world to the modern / Mary Beard.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] | Series: The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; 2011 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021012740 (print) | LCCN 2021012741 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691222363 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780691225869 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Kings and rulers—Portraits. | Power (Social sciences) in art. | Emperors—Rome—Portraits. | Art, Roman—Influence. | BISAC: HISTORY / Ancient / Rome | ART / History / General
Classification: LCC N7575 .B38 2021 (print) | LCC N7575 (ebook) | DDC 709.02/16—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012740
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012741
Version 1.0
This is the sixtieth volume of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. This volume is based on lectures delivered in 2011. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in the Bollingen Series, supported by the Bollingen Foundation.
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Designed by Jeff Wincapaw
For the American Academy in Rome
with gratitude and happy memories
Contents
viii List of Tables
ix Preface
1 CHAPTER I
The Emperor on the Mall: An Introduction
43 CHAPTER II
Who’s Who in the Twelve Caesars
78 CHAPTER III
Coins and Portraits, Ancient and Modern
118 CHAPTER IV
The Twelve Caesars, More or Less
151 CHAPTER V
The Most Famous Caesars of Them All
188 CHAPTER VI
Satire, Subversion and Assassination
235 CHAPTER VII
Caesar’s Wife … Above Suspicion?
274 CHAPTER VIII
Afterword
287 Acknowledgements
289 Appendix: The Verses underneath Aegidius Sadeler’s Series of Emperors and Empresses
303 Notes
335 Bibliography
358 List of Illustrations
368 Index
Tables
Table 1. The Julio-Claudian Dynasty
Table 2. The Julio-Claudian Dynasty: The Main Female Characters
Table 3. The ‘Agrippinas’
Preface
We are still surrounded by Roman emperors. It is now almost two millennia since the ancient city of Rome ceased to be capital of an empire, but even now—in the West at least—almost everyone recognises the name, and sometimes even the look, of Julius Caesar or Nero. Their faces not only stare at us from museum shelves or gallery walls; they feature in films, advertisements and newspaper cartoons. It takes very little (a laurel wreath, toga, lyre and some background flames) for a satirist to turn a modern politician into a ‘Nero fiddling while Rome burns’, and most of us get the point. Over the last five hundred years or so, these emperors and some of their wives and mothers, sons and daughters, have been recreated countless times in paint and tapestry, silver and ceramic, marble and bronze. My guess is that, before ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’, there were more images in Western art of Roman emperors than of any other human figures, with the exception of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and a small handful of saints. Caligula and Claudius continue to resonate across centuries and continents in a way that Charlemagne, Charles V or Henry VIII do not. Their influence goes far beyond the library or lecture room.
I have lived more intimately than most people with these ancient rulers. For forty years now they have been a large part of my job. I have scrutinised their words, from their legal judgements to their jokes. I have analysed the basis of their power, unpicked their rules of succession (or lack of them), and often enough deplored their domination. I have peered at their heads on cameos and coins. And I have taught students to enjoy, and to interrogate closely, what Roman writers chose to say about them. The lurid stories of the emperor Tiberius’s antics in his swimming pool on the island of Capri, the rumours of Nero’s lust for his mother or of what Domitian did to flies (torture with them with his pen nib) have always gone down well in the modern imagination and they certainly tell us a good deal about ancient Roman fears and fantasies. But—as I have repeatedly insisted to those who would love to take them at face value—they are not necessarily ‘true’ in the usual sense of the word. I have been by profession a classicist, historian, teacher, sceptic and occasional killjoy.
In this book, I am shifting my focus, onto the modern images of emperors that surround us, and I am asking some of the most basic questions about how and why they were produced. Why have artists since the Renaissance chosen to depict these ancient characters in such large numbers and in such a variety of ways? Why have customers chosen to buy them, whether in the form of lavish sculptures or cheap plaques and prints? What do the faces of long-dead autocrats, many more with a reputation for villainy than for heroism, mean to modern audiences?
The ancient emperors themselves are very important characters in the chapters that follow, especially the first ‘Twelve Caesars’, as they are now often known—from Julius Caesar (assassinated in 44 BCE) to the fly-torturing Domitian (assassinated in 96 CE), via Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, among others (Table 1). Almost all the modern works of art that I discuss were produced in dialogue with the Romans’ own representations of their rulers, and with all those ancient stories, far-fetched though they might be, of their deeds and misdeeds. But in this book the emperors themselves share the spotlight with a wide range of modern artists: some, like Mantegna, Titian or Alma-Tadema, are well known in the Western tradition; others are drawn from generations of now anonymous weavers, cabinet-makers, silversmiths, printers and ceramicists who created some of the most striking and influential images of these Caesars. They share the spotlight too with a selection of the Renaissance humanists, antiquarians, scholars and modern archaeologists who have turned their energies to identifying or reconstructing—wrongly or rightly—these ancient faces of power, and with the even wider range of people, from cleaners to courtiers, who have been impressed, enraged, bored or puzzled by what they saw. In other words, I am not only interested in the emperors themselves or in the artists who have recreated them, but in the rest of us who look.
There are, I hope, some surprises in store, and some unexpectedly ‘extreme’ art history. We shall be meeting emperors in very unlikely places, from chocolates to sixteenth-century wallpaper and gaudy eighteenth-century waxwork. We shall be puzzling over statues whose date is even now so disputed that no one can agree whether they are ancient Roman, modern pastiches, fakes or replicas, or creative Renaissance tributes to the imperial tradition. We shall be reflecting on why so many of these images have been imaginatively re-identified or persistently confused over hundreds of years: one emperor taken for another, mothers and daughters mixed up, female characters in the history of Rome (mis)interpreted as male, or vice versa. And we shall be reconstructing, from surviving copies and other faint hints, a lost series of Roman imperial faces from the sixteenth century, which are now almost universally forgotten, but which were once so familiar that they defined how people across Europe commonly imagined the Caesars. My aim is to show why images of these Roman emperors—autocrats and tyrants though they may have been—still matter in the history of art and culture.
The origins of this bo ok lie in the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts that I delivered in Washington, DC, during the spring of 2011. Since then I have discovered new material, drawn new connections and explored some of my case studies in greater detail (and in different directions). But the book starts, and ends, as the lecture series did, with a curious object that once stood just a stone’s throw from the auditorium in the National Gallery of Art, where I was speaking: not a portrait of an emperor, but a large Roman marble coffin, or sarcophagus, which—so it was believed, and hyped, by some—had once served as an emperor’s last resting place.
I
THE EMPEROR ON THE MALL
AN INTRODUCTION
A Roman Emperor and an American President
For many years, an imposing marble sarcophagus was a fixture, and a curiosity, on the Mall in Washington, DC, standing on the grass just outside the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building (Fig. 1.1). It had been discovered in Lebanon, one of two sarcophagi found together on the outskirts of Beirut in 1837 and brought to the United States a couple of years later by Commodore Jesse D. Elliott, the commander of a squadron of the US navy on patrol in the Mediterranean. The story was that it had once held the remains of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus, who ruled between 222 and 235 CE.1
Alexander has not remained a household name, despite a rather florid Handel opera, Alessandro Severo, woven around his life, and an overblown reputation in some parts of early modern Europe as an exemplary ruler, patron of the arts and public benefactor (Charles I of England particularly enjoyed comparison with him). A Syrian by birth, and a member of what was by this date a decidedly multi-ethnic Roman elite, he came to the throne aged thirteen, after the assassination of his cousin Elagabalus—whose legendary excesses outstripped even those of Caligula and Nero, and whose party trick of smothering his dinner guests to death under piles of rose petals was brilliantly captured by the nineteenth-century painter, and re-creator of ancient Rome, Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Fig. 6.23). Alexander was the youngest Roman emperor ever up to that point, and most of the twenty or so surviving ancient portraits of him (or believed to be of him) depict a rather dreamy, almost vulnerable, youth (Fig. 1.2). Whether he was ever as exemplary as later ages imagined is doubtful. Nonetheless, ancient writers saw him as a relatively safe pair of hands, largely thanks to the influence of his mother, Julia Mamaea, the ‘power behind the throne’, who plays a predictably sinister role in Handel’s opera. In the end, while on military campaign together, mother and son were both assassinated by rebellious Roman troops; whether the soldiers’ anger was provoked by Alexander’s economic prudence (or meanness), his lack of martial skills or the influence of Julia Mamaea depends on which report you believe.2
1.1 Visitors in the late 1960s reading the information panel in front of the Roman sarcophagus outside the Arts and Industries Building on the Mall in Washington, DC: the ‘Tomb in which Andrew Jackson REFUSED to be Buried’.
All this happened more than a century after those first, and more familiar, Twelve Caesars. But Alexander was still an emperor very much in their style, even down to the seedier stories and allegations (the slightly too close relations with his mother, the danger of the soldiers, the outrageous predecessor and the brutal assassination). In fact, modern historians have often seen him as the last in the traditional line of Roman rulers, which had begun with Julius Caesar; and one sixteenth-century printmaker and publisher, by some creative counting and strategic omissions, managed to double the original Twelve and end up with a diagram of imperial succession that placed Alexander conveniently as emperor number Twenty-Four.3 What followed his murder was very different. It was decades of rule by a series of military adventurers, many holding command for a couple years only, some of them barely setting foot in the city of Rome, despite being ‘Roman’ emperors. It is a change of character in Roman power nicely symbolised by the frequent claim—true or not—about Alexander’s immediate successor, Maximinus ‘the Thracian’: on the throne for three years between 235 and 238 CE, he has gone down in history as the first Roman emperor who could not read or write.4
1.2 Portrait bust of Alexander Severus from the line-up of Roman emperors in the ‘Room of the Emperors’ in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The identification of individual emperors is rarely certain, but the incised pupils in the eyes of this statue, and the treatment of the close-cropped hair are typical of sculpture of the early third century, and there is a plausible match with some of Alexander’s images on coins.
The story of the sarcophagus makes a vivid introduction to some of the twists and turns, debates, disagreements and edgy political controversies in my wider story of Roman imperial images, both modern and ancient. Alexander’s name was found nowhere on the coffin that he was supposed to have occupied, nor were there any other identifying marks on it; but the name ‘Julia Mamaea’ was clearly inscribed on the other one. For Jesse Elliott, that made almost irresistible the connection between the pair of coffins he had acquired and the unfortunate young emperor and his mother. They had been murdered together and then must have been buried side by side, in appropriately imperial grandeur close to Alexander’s birthplace, in what is now Lebanon. Or so he managed to convince himself.
He was wrong. As sceptics were soon pointing out, the assassination was supposed to have taken place some two thousand miles from Beirut, in Germany or even Britain (a geographical link that appealed to the court of Charles I, even if the murder did not); and, anyway, one ancient writer claimed that the body of the emperor was taken back to Rome for burial.5 If that were not enough to scotch the idea, the ‘Julia Mamaea’ commemorated in the inscription was firmly stated to have died at the age of thirty, making it impossible for her to have been Alexander’s mother—unless, as one of Elliott’s own junior officers later tartly observed, she had ‘given birth to her son, when she was but three years old, which is, to say the least, unusual’. The woman who had once occupied the coffin was presumably one of the many other inhabitants of the Roman Empire with that same common name.6
Besides, none of the people engaged in these debates appear to have realised that there was at least one rival candidate for the burial place of the imperial couple; or if they did realise, they kept quiet about it. An elaborate marble sarcophagus over four thousand miles away in the Capitoline Museums at Rome—celebrated in a notable engraving by Piranesi and well known to keen eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists—was supposed to have been shared by Alexander and Julia Mamaea, shown reclining together in imperial splendour on its lid (Fig. 1.3). There was even a connection with the blue-glass ‘Portland Vase’, which is now one of the highlights of the British Museum—famous for its exquisite white cameo decoration, and also for being attacked by a drunken visitor in 1845. If the story is true (a big ‘if’) that this vase was rediscovered in the sixteenth century actually inside the sarcophagus, then maybe it was the original receptacle that had once contained the emperor’s ashes (even though lodging a small vase of ashes inside a vast coffin obviously designed to hold an intact, uncremated body seems a little odd). In this case, the burial place just outside Rome is a better fit with some of the historical evidence. But overall, as the more scrupulous nineteenth-century tourist guidebooks conceded, this identification too was a combination of wishful thinking and outright fantasy.7
1.3 An alternative candidate for the last resting place of Alexander Severus. Piranesi’s 1756 engraving of the sarcophagus, in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, shows the figures of the dead reclining on the lid, with scenes from the story of the Greek hero Achilles carved underneath.
Unfounded as they were, the imperial associations of Elliott’s sarco- phagi lingered longer. That is largely because of the strange and slightly gruesome history of these trophies after they arrived in America. Elliott did not intend them to become museum pieces. That of ‘Julia Mamaea’ he planned to re-use as the last resting place of the Philadelphia philanthropist Stephen Girard; but, as he had long been dead and interred elsewhere, it passed into the collection of Girard College, and in 1955 was loaned to Bryn Mawr College, where it still stands in the cloister. After an abortive attempt to have ‘Alexander’s’ re-used for the remains of James Smithson (illegitimate child of an English aristocrat, scientist and founding donor of the Smithsonian Institution), Elliott presented it in 1845 to the National Institute, a major collection of American heritage housed in the Patent Office, in ‘the fervent hope’ that it would shortly contain ‘all that is mortal of the patriot and hero, Andrew Jackson’.
