Twelve Caesars, page 21
6.5 A classic example of Julius Caesar’s magnanimity: seated at the centre of the scene, he orders the correspondence of his defeated rival, Pompey, to be destroyed—so that any information it contained could not be used against others. This is the main panel in the ceiling of the ‘Chamber of the Emperors’ in the Palazzo Te, the Gonzaga pleasure palace on the outskirts of Mantua, designed by Giulio Romano in the 1520s.
That sense of foreboding certainly informs Andrea Mantegna’s series of nine paintings depicting Caesar’s extravagant triumphal procession in 46 BCE, held to honour his military victories all over the Roman world. Originally painted for the Gonzaga in the late fifteenth century (possibly commissioned by Duke Federico’s father), they were another part of the haul of art acquired by Charles I in the 1620s.13 They have been on display at Hampton Court almost continuously ever since. There have been swings of fashion in the appreciation of Mantegna and disappointment in the paintings’ dilapidated condition and botched restorations—none more botched than that started by the artist Roger Fry in the early twentieth century, which notoriously removed the face of the single black soldier in the procession to make it match the white faces of all the others (Fig. 6.6).14 But overall these Triumphs have been as much admired as Verrio’s Caesars have been despised. It is partly that admiration—for such a brilliantly vivid re-creation of Roman spectacle—that has obscured the uncomfortable ambivalence of the theme depicted.
6.6 The first two scenes from Andrea Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar, of the late fifteenth century. Large canvases, almost three metres high, they draw on ancient descriptions of these sometimes flamboyant Roman victory parades: with their booty, paintings illustrating the campaigns and slogans on placards. Here the single black participant, painted out by Roger Fry, has been restored to his rightful place.
Most of the canvases in the series concentrate on the many participants in the procession itself, its jostling soldiers, captives and curious spectators, as well as the booty and precious artworks that were being trundled through the streets of Rome. But if these appear to be a self-confident assertion of dynastic military success, the final canvas changes the tone. Here Caesar himself sits on his triumphal chariot, a gaunt pensive figure, who seems already to have some inkling of what fate has in store less than two years hence (Fig. 6.7).15 The prominent figure behind him heightens that unease. For this ‘Winged Victory’ takes the place of the slave whose job it was in the real procession to whisper repeatedly in the general’s ear, ‘Remember you are (only) a man’—in case, as happened with Caesar it was often said, success should encourage him to forget his merely human status.16 And a closer look reveals even deeper anxieties elsewhere. A placard carried by a soldier in the second canvas (Fig. 6.6) spells out the honours voted to Caesar for his conquest of Gaul, but it finishes with three ominous words: ‘invidia spreta superataq(ue)’ (literally ‘with envy scorned and overcome’).17 The truth was, of course, quite the reverse. Anyone familiar with even the bare outline of Caesar’s career would know that one of the reasons for his assassination was that he had not overcome the envy of some of his fellow citizens.
6.7 The final scene in Mantegna’s series of Triumphs, with Caesar on his triumphal chariot, raises awkward questions (as the ceremony often did for the Romans themselves). Did the glory of it all go too far? Was this an example of pride coming before a fall? Would the victorious general heed the message whispered repeatedly in his ear that he was ‘only a man’? In Caesar’s case, assassination followed within eighteen months.
There is an ambivalence here that sits uneasily, at the very least, with the pretensions to dynastic power or one-man rule of either the Gonzaga or the English monarchy. Perhaps it was because he understood this (rather than because he was a fan of Mantegna’s brush-strokes) that Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the short-lived parliamentary, or republican, government, withdrew the Triumphs from the sale of the rest of the ‘king’s goods’ after the execution of Charles I, and kept the series for the state. (What better warning lesson was there for any would-be monarch?) But another set of works of art that once had pride of place in Hampton Court, also on the theme of Julius Caesar and also later reserved for Cromwell, raises these ambivalences even more sharply: a group of precious tapestries commissioned by King Henry VIII, the palace’s most famous proprietor. The originals have long been destroyed, lost and almost entirely forgotten, and (as with Titian’s Caesars) only clever detective work can reconstruct them from many later versions and adaptations. But they comprised one of Tudor England’s most important and expensive masterpieces—and one whose precise classical theme and difficult message has been misinterpreted for centuries. If we take the trouble to dig below the surface (and it is some trouble), an intriguing story emerges.
Woven Caesars at Hampton Court
Henry acquired these ten vast Flemish tapestries, featuring episodes in the life of Julius Caesar, in the mid 1540s. Woven in wool, silk and gilt thread, each one was around four and a half metres in height—and, hung side by side, they would have stretched for a width of almost eighty metres. When the royal collection was valued a hundred years later, this set was priced at £5022, making it the second most expensive item out of all ‘the king’s goods’. That was more than four times the cash value assigned to Titian’s eleven Caesars (and more than eight times what those paintings actually raised), and it was exceeded only by another set of tapestries almost certainly also commissioned by Henry: this was ten, even larger, scenes illustrating the biblical story of Abraham, assessed at £8260.18
It is hard now to recapture the importance of tapestries in Renaissance decoration, both in terms of price and prestige, and in terms of their number (inventories suggest that there were more than 2500 across Henry VIII’s residences, even if that figure is inflated by some that were serving as mundane bed coverings rather than display pieces). Those we now see usually hang rather drearily, along the corridors of stately homes and galleries, in drab browns and greens, giving little hint of their original status and sparkle. Their bright colours have faded from long exposure to the light, and the glitter of the metal threads has been oxidised into oblivion. By the nineteenth century, many of these earlier masterpieces, which had often been more coveted than paintings by the richest European aristocrats—featuring themes from Roman imperial triumphs and the story of Hercules to the Garden of Eden and the Massacre of the Innocents—looked so dull and undistinguished that they were simply thrown away.19
That is almost certainly what happened to Henry’s tapestries of Caesar. They were noticed and admired by visitors to Hampton Court at the end of the sixteenth century (one praised the images as being ‘woven into the tapestry to the very life’). After being withdrawn from the sale of ‘goods’ after the execution of King Charles, rather than sold at what would likely have been a huge profit, they were later returned to the royal collection. Up until the 1720s, there are various references to them being repaired, relined and some moved around to different palaces, until a last fleeting glimpse of them is caught in 1819 (when, or so optimists believe, a watercolour of Queen Caroline’s Drawing Room at Kensington Palace shows one serving almost as wallpaper, behind the framed paintings on the wall).20 At some point after that—unless they are lurking, abandoned and unnoticed, in some royal attic—they must have been discarded on the nineteenth-century equivalent of a skip.
It is, nevertheless, possible to reconstruct the general appearance of Henry’s series. For even more than painting, tapestry was a medium of replication. The original paper designs for the weaving—or copies of them, or copies of copies—were regularly re-used or sold on, sometimes a century or more later, to produce new versions of roughly the same scenes. You would expect a major series like this to have its descendants—re-weavings or slightly adjusted iterations—in the collections of other members of the super-rich of Renaissance Europe. And so, if you look hard enough, it does.
No complete set of tapestries descended from Henry’s originals survives.21 But some clever sleuthing has made convincing connections between a number of scattered documents, which appear to refer to later versions of this Caesar series, and individual tapestries that remain on public display, or have come to light fleetingly when sold at auction across Europe and the United States (these objects are still collectors’ items on the art market, though at prices far lower in real terms than those they once commanded). The arguments remain tentative in places. But overall, thanks largely to the later generations of these tapestries that once hung on the walls of Pope Julius III, two members of the Farnese family and Queen Christina of Sweden, we can get a fairly clear impression of the line-up of Henry’s set. The lucky find of what appear to be a couple of small preliminary sketches for one of the scenes has even helped to identify the designer behind the series as the early sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst.22
Eye-witness descriptions of Henry’s tapestries mention the precise subjects of only two scenes in his original group: the murder of Julius Caesar himself in 44 BCE; and the murder four years earlier of his enemy, Pompey.23 The scene of Caesar’s death is almost certainly reflected in a tapestry still on show in the Vatican. This is clearly dated 1549, and is one of a set of ten acquired, according to documentary records, by Julius III in the early 1550s, made in Brussels very shortly after Henry’s commission—though a little less lavishly (this set had no metal thread: ‘without gold’ as one inventory makes explicit) (Fig. 6.8).24
6.8 Caesar’s assassination on a huge tapestry (seven metres across) in the Vatican, dated 1549 and almost certainly produced by the same workshop as Henry VIII’s set. Caesar himself is submerged in the central group of assassins; we see him on the left in the background being warned of the plot by Artemidorus—but taking no notice.
It features a terrible melée, in the middle of which Caesar is being dispatched by the daggers of the conspirators; while in the background, on a much smaller scale, the philosopher Artemidorus is vainly attempting to pass the victim a note warning him of what is about to happen (an incident recounted by several ancient writers, but which would become even more famous by being re-staged in William Shakespeare’s play).25 At the top, a lengthy caption woven into the fabric offers what art historians have called a ‘moralising’ reading of the scene (finishing with the words ‘the man who used to fill the whole world with the blood of citizens, ended up filling the senate house with his own blood’). Moralising it may be. But it is also a quotation, slightly abbreviated and now universally unrecognised, from the description of Caesar’s death by the second-century CE Roman historian Florus, chosen to act as a key to what is depicted below.26 It is only one of many classical allusions in these tapestries that have been forgotten, misread or mistranslated.
This Assassination is the closest we get to the original pieces owned by Henry VIII: made in the same decade, almost certainly from the same design and by the same weavers.27 But, thanks to an intriguing and sometimes tortuous trail, the other Roman scenes that once, so expensively, decorated the walls of Hampton Court can mostly be pinned down. It is worth getting a flavour of the twists and turns of this trail by following up just one part of it—starting from a sixteenth-century tapestry that appeared at auction in 1935 and has since gone underground again (Fig. 6.9).
6.9 A descendant of Henry VIII’s Caesarian tapestries appeared on the art market in the 1930s; its current whereabouts are unknown. The scene, however, is clearly identifiable. Caesar has returned to Rome in the middle of the civil war against Pompey and—on the hunt for cash—breaks down the doors of the treasury.
This shows a group of men in Roman dress apparently trying to break down a closed door with a ram, their feet and brute force. It might not otherwise catch our eye, but the woven caption makes it part of the story of Julius Caesar: ‘Abripit absconsos thesauros Caesar et auro / vi potitur quamvis magne Metelle negas’ (Caesar carries off the hidden treasure and takes possession of the gold by force, although you forbid it, great Metellus). For those viewers in the know, it depicts the moment at the beginning of his war against Pompey when Caesar enters Rome and forcibly gets his hands on the cash locked away in the Roman state treasury, despite the opposition of Metellus, one of Pompey’s loyalists.28 But more than that, a chain of evidence makes it close to certain that this tapestry is a descendant of one of Henry’s.
The first hint comes in an inventory of the tapestries taken by Queen Christina to Rome when she abdicated in 1654, among them a set featuring Julius Caesar. This included a Murder of Caesar and Murder of Pompey, matching the two themes documented at Hampton Court, and making it overwhelmingly likely that Christina’s set was related to Henry’s. Significantly, it also included a piece described as Caesar Breaking into the Treasury. That connection is strengthened by another inventory, which lists ten tapestries on similar Caesarian subjects (presumably another set of ‘relations’ of Henry’s) owned by Alexander Farnese, the Duke of Parma, in 1570. Each of these is referred to in shorthand by the first word of its woven caption—one being Abripit, the exact word which occurs first here (‘Abripit absconsos …’).29 Just to clinch it, there is a visual link too. For in 1714, to celebrate the marriage of a Farnese princess to Philip V of Spain, the whole facade of Parma Cathedral was draped with their family’s two sets of tapestries on the theme of Caesar (Alexander’s mother had also acquired a set, as early as 1550). In a detailed contemporary print of the cathedral decked out for the occasion, you can see on the ground floor, hanging prominently (though reversed) on the right-hand side of the main door, precisely this design (Fig. 6.10).30
In this way—thanks to a combination of archival learning and lucky survivals—investigative art historians have gradually been able to piece together the appearance of the original set at Hampton Court. One of the latest additions is a splendid tapestry of Caesar Crossing the River Rubicon (the act which marked Caesar’s invasion of Italy and so the beginning of civil war). This turned up in an auction in New York City in 2000,31 and—as I write—is awaiting a buyer in a carpet showroom there (Fig. 6.11). Its subject and caption, ‘Iacta alea est …’ (The die has been thrown), can also be matched up with the inventories of Queen Christina and of Alexander Farnese, and a similar design can again be spotted on the cathedral facade, this time at the top right-hand corner.32 The same goes for a more sinister image now known from three tapestries in Italy and Portugal. It shows a group of men consulting a prophet or a magician, surrounded in some of the creepier versions by an assortment of snakes and bats, against a witch’s cauldron. The captions on each are different, but one reads ‘Spurinna haruspex Cesaris necem predicit’ (Spurinna the soothsayer predicts the death of Caesar)—making this another of the warnings that Caesar received shortly before his assassination, here the dire prediction that he should (in Shakespeare’s words) ‘beware the Ides of March’ (Fig. 6.12).33
6.10 A contemporary print shows Parma Cathedral in Italy decorated to celebrate a Farnese wedding in 1714—with several ‘Caesar tapestries’ on display. On the right of the main door, for example, Caesar breaks into the treasury (Fig. 6.9); on the top right, Caesar crosses the Rubicon (Fig. 6. 11); in the centre of the facade on the right, the decapitation of Caesar’s rival, Pompey (known from a surviving tapestry at Powis Castle).
There are, predictably, all kinds of loose ends in these reconstructions. If we add everything together, we end up with more scenes than the ten that comprised Henry’s and the other main sets. Were some added later, or substitutions made? There are uncertainties too about the dates and order of the later weavings, some probably as late as the second half of the seventeenth century. It largely comes down to making deductions from the style of the borders (though some of these have been removed or replaced) and from the different forms of the caption (as a rough rule, the shorter the later). Whether some of the individual examples that have passed through the salerooms once belonged to the sets owned by Queen Christina or the Farnese family is another mystery.34 But overall, the reconstruction of one of the most sumptuous works of art in Henry VIII’s collection has been a triumph of scholarly detective work.
Except for one thing. No modern art historians (and, indeed, few of those who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries re-used the original designs) have correctly identified the ancient source from which van Aelst took his inspiration.35 The result is that they have drastically misinterpreted some of the scenes depicted, and have completely missed some of the awkward implications of these Roman imperial images.
6.11 Caesar approaches the river Rubicon, where the female figure (of ‘Rome’) confronts him. The caption on the tapestry (almost five metres across) identifies the scene. ‘Iacta alea est’ it starts, ‘the die (or dice) has been thrown’, meaning that things are now all up in the air. It goes on to say, ‘… he crosses the Rubicon, following the signs in the heavens (and) so, impetuous, he seizes (the town of) Rimini’.
6.12 The scene on this sixteenth-century tapestry (roughly four metres square) has usually been identified as Julius Caesar consulting the soothsayer Spurinna; and the caption reads ‘Julius Caesar here flees the furious fury’. But the cauldron, the eerie bats and the sex of the ‘soothsayer’ suggest a different reading (see pp. 207–8).
Lucan on Tapestry
Henry’s tapestries did not simply depict key events in Caesar’s career, as has usually been assumed. And they were not, as a group, based on Suetonius’s Life or on any other ancient works of history. Instead, almost every scene in the series for which we have direct evidence is clearly inspired by the first-century CE poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, now usually known as ‘Lucan’. He was a victim of the emperor Nero, forced to suicide in 65 CE, after his involvement in a failed coup, and his one surviving poem, the epic Pharsalia, takes as its theme the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (its title referring to the final battle of Pharsalus). This is a bleak dissection of civil conflict, almost an experimental anti-epic, from which no character emerges as a true hero. How far it represents an unequivocal attack on one-man rule has long been debated, but Lucan’s Caesar (like his Pompey) is certainly deeply flawed, his military skill, drive and ambition put to horribly destructive ends.36
