Twelve Caesars, page 16
So it turned out. The scene identified as Domitian’s wife riding to join him in Germany could not possibly be that. Nothing of the sort features in Suetonius’s Life—and, anyway, why is the woman apparently on fire? It must instead be the story of Tiberius’s lucky escape when as a baby, during the civil wars following Julius Caesar’s assassination, he was on the run with his mother Livia, and a forest fire nearly engulfed their whole party (Fig. 4.15b). Likewise, what was dubbed the submission of the Germans to Domitian (puzzlingly accompanied by scenes of collapsing buildings) fits much better with Suetonius’s reference to Tiberius’s generosity to the cities of the eastern empire after a severe earthquake. And the battle between Romans and some distinctively clad sixteenth-century pike-men featured on the remaining scene could equally well depict Tiberius’s campaigns in Germany as Domitian’s. It took only a careful look, and a text of Suetonius, to see that the wrong emperor was on the wrong bowl.53
This obviously raised other questions. If the Domitian bowl really illustrated scenes from the Life of Tiberius, where did that leave the so-called ‘Tiberius’ bowl that was in Lisbon, wrongly attached, as had long been recognised, to the figure of Galba? This turned out to be the bowl of Caligula (thanks to some extraordinary wishful thinking, the scene of Caligula prancing on horseback across a bridge of boats, for example, had been interpreted as Tiberius going into retirement on the island of Capri) (Fig. 4.15c). To square the circle, the so-called ‘Caligula’ bowl in Minneapolis proved to be that of the elusive Domitian, who had also fallen victim to some over-optimistic misidentifications (the scene of the burning of the Capitol in Rome during the civil war of 68–69, complete with unmistakable flames, had rather desperately been read as the outbreak of popular disturbances on the death of Caligula’s father Germanicus).54 But that was only the start: as recent work on the tazze has shown, there have been any number of misreadings of the scenes, and—despite the clear labelling—emperors have migrated from bowl to bowl. The Domitian bowl in Minneapolis is actually topped by the figure of Augustus, while the Augustus bowl is combined with the figure of Nero, serving as the much-loved table decoration of a private collector in Los Angeles. And so on. Only two, Julius Caesar and Claudius, seem to have survived in their original state.
These recombinations have been going on for centuries; the fact that they are only possible when more than one of the tazze is in the same ownership pushes the mistakes back into the nineteenth century and most likely before. They are partly to be explained by the practical ease with which the pieces come apart. If all twelve emperors were unscrewed to be cleaned, it would take, at the very least, considerable efficiency to ensure they all returned to their correct bowls (after all, even the expert conservators in Hanover managed to return the marble busts of Galba and Vespasian to the wrong plinths). They are also partly to be explained by a maybe increasing unfamiliarity with the text of Suetonius. If the cleaning staff, understandably, did not spot that the scenes chased on bowls failed to match the emperors, then neither did the rich owners and collectors. But overall, whatever the precise reasons, the fluidity of these combinations is a wonderful example of how the canonical set of the Twelve Caesars is almost never quite as canonical as it seems, but almost always in flux, in the process of disaggregation and recombination. Behind those line-ups of marble busts are many unexpected histories such as this.
But there is an added level of pointed irony and thwarted intentions in the story of the imperial figure and bowl that I went to see in the Victoria and Albert Museum. When it first entered the museum in 1927, it actually displayed the figure of Vitellius above what was then taken to be the Domitian bowl. The present combination is the result of an attempt in the 1950s to put some of the emperors back with their right bowls. Three museums, the Victoria and Albert, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Royal Ontario Museum, which each owned one of the tazze, arranged to swap their figures. The figure of Vitellius was sent to the Met to join the Vitellius bowl, Otho, who had stood on the Vitellius bowl, was sent by the Met to the Ontario Museum to be reunited with ‘his’ bowl’, and Ontario’s figure of Domitian came to London. It was a well-meaning example of international collaboration, and the Met and the Royal Ontario Museum each ended up with their tazze correctly composed. The only trouble was that—as the London bowl did not actually belong to Domitian at all—the Victoria and Albert’s tazza remained just as mongrel as ever.55 There could be no better symbol of the perils of misidentification stretching back hundreds of years, and of the ways that the desire to order and systematise these sets of Twelve Caesars is so often transcended or thwarted. I very much doubt that Domitian will be leaving the Tiberius bowl any time soon. But who knows?
4.15
(a) The bowl of Tiberius (previously identified as Domitian): Tiberius stands down from his triumphal chariot to honour Augustus
(b) The bowl of Tiberius (previously identified as Domitian): Livia and the baby Tiberius escape through the flames in the Civil Wars
(c) The bowl of Caligula (previously identified as Tiberius): Caligula on his bridge of boats across the Bay of Baiae
Those perils of misidentification will be one theme in the next chapter, which takes a careful look at another major work of sixteenth-century art: Titian’s eleven Caesars, probably the most significant and influential set of modern Caesars of all, which travelled the length of Europe, only to be completely destroyed in a fire in Spain in the eighteenth century. Theirs is a fascinating story of reconstruction, with all the fun of getting down to the detail of just one set of Caesars. How can we recapture what these lost paintings looked like, and what was so special about them? Can we recreate their changing contexts—and meaning? Why did they become the Caesars for centuries in early modern Europe?
But it starts with an unexpected tale of survival.
V
THE MOST FAMOUS CAESARS OF THEM ALL
Lucky Finds?
In 1857, so the story went, Abraham Darby IV loaned portraits of six of the Caesars painted by Titian himself to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, a show that still ranks as the largest art exhibition ever held in Great Britain. Darby had made his money from the iron industry, in the wake of his more innovative great uncle, Abraham Darby III, who is famed for having constructed the first iron bridge in the world (across the river Severn near his works in central England). The younger Darby was looking for prestige in art as well as in iron, and was investing much of his fortune in building up a large collection of paintings. He had bought these particular masterpieces from another entrepreneur, John Watkins Brett: a telegraph engineer, art dealer and plausible chancer—who had almost managed in the 1830s to persuade the United States government to make his own collection the basis of the first American National Gallery. Brett was a canny salesman and seems to have given these six Caesars—Julius, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Galba and Otho—some irresistibly glamorous connections as well as a first-rate artistic pedigree (Fig. 5.1). The Duke of Wellington had apparently noticed that Titian’s Tiberius was the spitting image of Napoleon; while others spotted a definite resemblance between Wellington himself and the Galba.1
They were not, needless to say, Titian’s original Caesars at all. Those paintings, eleven in total, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Titus, had been commissioned in the 1530s by Federico Gonzaga, first Duke of Mantua in Northern Italy (one of a dynasty that combined a relatively low place in the pecking order of the European aristocracy with the possession of an extraordinary gallery of art); they had been acquired by Charles I of England, when the Gonzaga family hit hard times in the 1620s; and after Charles’s execution in 1649 they were bought by Spanish agents, ending up in the royal collection in the Alcázar palace in Madrid. They are now known only through numerous series of copies of varying quality (Fig. 5.2)—because, hung high up on the wall, and for that reason hard to rescue, they were completely destroyed when the palace burned down in December 1734, along with hundreds of other paintings. Velasquez’s Las Meninas was one of the lucky ones, saved by being torn from its frame and thrown out of a window.2
5.1 Believed by its mid-nineteenth-century owner, Abraham Darby IV, to be Titian’s original painting of the emperor Tiberius (‘TIBERIO’ is still faintly visible in the upper left corner), this was put on display at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857 (alongside the five other emperors from Darby’s set). Some critics at the time were doubtful about the authenticity of many pieces in this show (partly snobbishly—refusing to believe that a northern industrial town could host first-rate art). But in this case they were correct. It is a later copy.
5.2 The most influential copies of Titian’s Eleven Caesars were the prints made by Aegidius Sadeler in the early 1620s, on a reduced scale (these are roughly thirty-five centimetres in height; the originals were about three times larger). Here, from top left: (a) Julius Caesar; (b) Augustus; (c) Tiberius; (d) Caligula; (e) Claudius; (f) Nero; (g) Galba; (h) Otho; (i) Vitellius; (j) Vespasian; (k) Titus.
The more knowledgeable critics of the Manchester exhibition were well aware that Titian’s Caesars had been lost in Spain more than a century earlier (despite the cock-and-bull claim that these six had actually found their way to America after the execution of Charles I3). Along with many other paintings on display in 1857, lent by their often gullible owners, Darby’s prized possessions were dismissed in reviews as ‘second-rate copies’ not fit to ‘take their place among works of Titian’.4 This did not stop them being sold at Christie’s as ‘genuine’ Titians, when Darby (who had overreached himself in putting together his collection) was auctioning them off again in 1867; the prices fetched (each one went for under £5) suggests that the bidders had a better idea.5
Brett and Darby were not the only ones to profit from, or to be taken in by, the fantasy of Titian’s original Caesars. A few decades earlier, in 1829, the British press was reporting ‘an extraordinary instance of good fortune’. ‘A man who keeps a petty broker’s shop in an obscure situation in Marylebone’, as the articles rather loftily opened, had bought up ten old paintings at a local auction for £5 12s; later inspected by ‘lovers of vertu’, they were adjudged to be ten of Titian’s Caesars and valued at £2000. One writer went on to claim that the man had quickly sold his lucky find to ‘a rich English nobleman, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, for the exorbitant sum of eight thousand pounds’.6 There is a definite whiff of an urban myth to this tale (note the convenient amnesia over the buyer’s name). But, true or not, it is part of the extraordinary allure of this set of imperial images. More than a hundred years after they had gone up in flames, they were still providing good copy for popular newspapers. For centuries, these celebrity paintings—now more or less unrecognised, except by the most learned ‘lovers of vertu’—represented the modern face of the ancient emperors.7
It has been impossible to keep a few glimpses of Titian’s emperors out of this book so far, from the portrait of Charles I modelled on Titian’s Otho (Fig. 3.14) to the disreputable Charles Sackville ironically pictured in the guise of Titian’s Julius Caesar (Fig. 3.13). But there is an important story to be told of these paintings in their own right, and of their replicas that were found in thousands across Europe. Some of these were taken directly from the originals themselves, some were much more remotely connected to them; and they were produced in any number of different media, from paintings and prints on paper, to re-creations in three dimensional sculptures, cheap plaques or elaborate book bindings. To be sure, different versions of the Caesars, based on the work of other artists, also established a foothold in the popular imagination from the sixteenth century on,8 but never with the impact of the faces that Titian created, nor in such ingenious (or improbable) adaptations—which went as far as a delicate French porcelain cup, decorated with a copy of a copy of a copy of the head of Titian’s Augustus, out of which members of the British royal family may have sipped their tea in the early nineteenth century (Fig. 5.3).9
5.3 Tea fit for a king, or queen. A copy of Titian’s Augustus, drawn from Sadeler’s prints (Fig. 5.2b), decorates a small French teacup, just nine centimetres tall, bought by the future King George IV, in 1800.
These Caesars raise in a new form some of the issues we have already explored. There are plenty of curious misidentifications lurking here and more intriguing twists and turns in their story, with all the proud owners, the scheming middlemen and hucksters who bought and sold them, and the near disasters they suffered along the way; long before the final blaze, van Dyck had been asked to step in to restore at least one of the emperors seriously damaged by a mercury leak on board ship during their journey from Mantua to London. And they reintroduce some of the characters that we have met before, including the dealer and antiquarian Jacopo Strada, who in the 1560s commissioned the drawings that have left us the most accurate idea of the paintings’ original installation in the Ducal Palace in Mantua. But they also open up some big questions of interpretation. In their travels from Italy to England to Spain, and in their replications that became almost ubiquitous in Europe, it is possible to pin down a whole variety of different readings of these imperial figures in their different settings. Sometimes they have been an important accessory of aristocratic bravura and a legitimation of dynastic power; sometimes they have been a prompt to reflect on the dangers, corruption and immorality of autocracy—as some hard-talking Latin verses attached to the most popular series of early printed copies of the paintings make very clear.
One of the morals of the story of Abraham Darby’s Caesars is that Titian’s original canvases, painted in Venice between late 1536 and late 1539, can never entirely be separated from the thousands of reproductions that were produced from the mid-sixteenth century on. It is not simply that it sometimes proved difficult to distinguish the original from a reproduction (or that it was sometimes tempting not to try too hard to do so). Even more to the point, since the fire of 1734, our main access to the originals has been through those reproductions, with all the scholarly arguments that are inevitably raised about which of them is the ‘best’ guide to what Titian painted, or how much ‘better’ the originals might have been. That said, this chapter starts by focussing on what we can reconstruct of Titian’s Caesars themselves and their changing settings, relishing the story of what was once the most influential set of emperors in the modern world, its elusive details, curious puzzles and inconsistencies, before moving on to who copied them and why, to their wide diaspora and its implications.
The ‘Room of the Caesars’
In the sprawling palace of the Gonzaga, the room where the Caesars were originally on display now gives little hint of its once spectacular appearance (Fig. 5.4). In its current state, the relatively small first-floor ‘Camerino dei Cesari’10 (just under seven metres by five) is slightly gloomy, since later buildings have partly blocked the light to its single window, also removing what must once have been a great view. And it is only thanks to some energetic renovation in the 1920s (when parts of the ceiling fresco were uncovered and a set of copies of Titian’s paintings were purchased and reinserted into their appropriate places) that there is anything more to see than some empty stucco niches, decorated with a few generic classical scenes.11 It is hard to imagine that this was originally one of a series of splendid showcase rooms—the ‘Appartamento di Troia’, or Trojan Suite, as it was known (after paintings in another room illustrating scenes from the Trojan War)—sponsored by Federico Gonzaga, the first Duke of Mantua, to celebrate his own success: he had kept sufficiently on the right side of the Holy Roman emperor, Charles V, to have his title upgraded from mere marquis to duke in 1530, and his tortuously negotiated marriage to an aristocratic heiress had brought in new territory and wealth to Mantua.12 With his Titians in their elaborate setting, Federico presumably also intended his Camerino dei Cesari to echo—even upstage—some earlier imperial themes in the palace: not only its growing collection of ancient Roman sculpture, but also Andrea Mantegna’s medallions of eight emperors’ heads on the ceiling of the Camera picta, and even more famously, from the late fifteenth century, Mantegna’s series of nine canvases of The Triumphs of Caesar (Figs 3.9; 6.6–7).13
5.4 The ‘Room of the Caesars’ in the palace of the Gonzaga is now a very pale shadow of its sixteenth-century glory, even with copies of Titian’s paintings inserted into the spaces the originals once occupied (here, from left, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Titus). The decoration between the paintings is original (though the small sculptures from the niches have been lost), as is the mythological painting (with gods, goddesses and winds) on the ceiling.
