Twelve Caesars, page 28
For it does offer a particularly rich reading of the painting. Tiberius may have had a generally bad reputation in ancient and modern literature (if only as a morose hypocrite, who was Augustus’s last choice as heir, despite being Livia’s natural son), but according to Suetonius there was one woman to whom he was devoted, in true love. That was Vipsania Agrippina. But he was forced by his stepfather Augustus to divorce her, so that he could marry, for entirely dynastic reasons, Julia, Augustus’s own daughter (it only added to the marital intricacies that Julia had been the wife of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the father of Vipsania Agrippina). Tiberius was utterly opposed to the idea (and in the standard story, with its predictable dash of misogyny, Julia turned out to be a bundle of trouble), but he had no choice in the matter—and he never got over it. According to Suetonius, after this divorce, when Tiberius was still almost in mourning for Vipsania Agrippina, on one occasion he spotted her in the Roman street, and he followed her weeping. His minders ever after took great care that he should never catch a glimpse of her again.56
Maybe we have a hint of that in this image of two people staring in parallel, not looking at each other but held in the same canvas. Indeed, it is hard to think of a better way of capturing the relationship between Tiberius and his Agrippina. Rubens has, in other words, breathed life into what was almost a visual cliché of ancient cameo design, by blowing these figures up to almost life size and giving a new story, and a new significance, to the visual form.
We have learned again what a difference a name can make—even if in this case it is the same name.
VIII
AFTERWORD
Looking Back
In December 1802, a young Irishwoman, Catherine Wilmot, was staying in Florence on a long journey through Europe. After a visit to the Uffizi, she wrote home to her brother to share its highlights. To be honest, the gallery was not at that time quite the treasure house of artistic masterpieces that it is today. A large number of its prized works had been sent south to Palermo in an attempt to keep them (not entirely successfully, as it turned out) from the clutches of Napoleon, who wanted them for his new Museum of the Louvre.1 Even so, it is striking—but not I hope, by now, surprising—that top of Wilmot’s list came the line-up of busts of Roman emperors stretching into the third century CE, the usual mixture of ancient originals, modern versions, pastiches and hybrids. ‘What would have pleas’d you most of anything’, she wrote, ‘was an arrangement of Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar to Gallienus.’ For the busts of their partners, however, she had nothing but disdain, briskly dismissing the ‘frightful empresses smirking opposite to them’.2
As we have seen, for hundreds of years after the European Renaissance, images of Roman emperors—on museum shelves and far beyond—roused intense passions. Recaptured in marble and bronze, in paint and on paper, turned into waxwork, silver and tapestry, displayed on the backs of chairs, on porcelain teacups or stained-glass windows, emperors mattered. In the dialogue between present and past, imperial faces and imperial life-stories were alternately—even simultaneously—paraded as the legitimators of modern dynastic power, questioned as dubious role models or deplored as emblems of corruption. Not unlike the contested images in our modern ‘sculpture wars’, they provided a focus for debates on power and its discontents (and they are a useful reminder that the function of commemorative portraits is not simply celebration). But more than that, they became a template for representing kings, aristocrats and anyone rich enough to be the subject of a painting or sculpture. In fact, the whole genre of European portraiture has roots in those tiny heads of Roman emperors on coins, as well as in their busts or full-sized statues. It is no mere quirk of fashion that, at least up to the nineteenth century, so many statues of aristocrats, politicians, philosophers, soldiers and writers were kitted out in togas or Roman battle dress.
There has always been an edginess to modern images of Roman emperors, sometimes lurking just below what might now seem a blandly conservative surface. One of my favourite examples of this—worth saving to enjoy as a finale—is the bust of the Young Octavian (the future emperor Augustus), by the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, closely based on a sculpture of the same subject in the Vatican collection (Fig. 8.1). Lewis had an extraordinary career, thwarted by racism at home, but eventually finding some success as a professional artist in Rome, before moving to London where she died in 1907. To all appearances though, this work—whatever its technical skill—is indeed bland, unchallenging, almost sentimental. Or so it seems until we realise that at the same time as she was creating her Octavian, Lewis was also working on her now much more famous statue The Death of Cleopatra, first shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 (Fig. 8.2). The interpretation of this Cleopatra has been intensely debated. Was this a celebration of an African queen? Or was Lewis intentionally separating her image of Cleopatra from that of an African-American woman? Was she hinting here perhaps at the figure of the slave-owning ‘Old Pharaoh’ of African-American songs and sermons? Whatever the answers, this representation of the queen was radically new. Many artists before had focussed on the moment just before her death in 30 BCE when she resolved to kill herself rather than be paraded as a piece of booty in the triumph of her brutal Roman conqueror. Hardly any had ever depicted, as Lewis did, Cleopatra’s death agony itself—a shocking sight for the statue’s first viewers. But who was that brutal Roman conqueror? It was none other than the real ‘young Octavian’. The fact that these two pieces must have been taking shape, side by side, in her studio at the very same time decisively subverts the superficial blandness of the imperial bust; it undermines its apparent cloying innocence.3
But there is a twist in this story, which picks up another of the important themes of this book. When Lewis produced her version of the imperial statue in the 1870s, no one doubted that the Vatican bust was an unusually youthful image of the emperor Augustus, still going under the name of Octavian, which he used until 27 BCE; it had been discovered, so it was regularly claimed, in excavations at the site of the port of Rome at Ostia in the early nineteenth century. Now it is known as Young Octavian only for old time’s sake. For no one any longer believes that it represents him at all, with the usual names from among his would-be heirs and successors being canvassed instead. Predictably too there has been a series of suggestions that it is not even an ancient piece anyway, but a modern version or forgery—the connection with Ostia wishful thinking or outright fabrication. One of the most intriguing reconstructions holds that it was actually produced in the studio of Antonio Canova, the faint resemblance to the emperor Napoleon being far from coincidental. Although the most up-to-date studies have tended to favour an ancient date (and recent archival work has also tended to support the Ostian find-spot), there is a wonderful anachronic irony in imagining Lewis’s Young Octavian being based on an early nineteenth-century bust, informed as much by the image of Napoleon as by that of any ancient Roman imperial character.4
Whatever the right answer, these Young Octavians, both ancient and modern, underline just how fluid and shifting images of the Caesars are, Twelve or not. They are sometimes presented as a rigidly fixed category, founded in the dynastic certainties of Rome, and even—as in the classificatory scheme of Sir Robert Cotton’s library—acting as a symbol of the definitive organisation of knowledge itself. But that fixity is rarely quite what it seems. The history of images of the Caesars, right back to antiquity, is one of constructively changing identities, hapless or wilful misidentifications: of Caligulas recarved into Claudiuses, of Vespasian mixed up with his son Titus, of the face of Vitellius standing in for that of a portly ‘carver’ at the Last Supper, or—in the case of the Aldobrandini Tazze—of the figure of Domitian screwed into the wrong dish, to preside over scenes from the life of Tiberius. The category is so porous that even in Cotton’s library, Faustina and Cleopatra can be inserted into the ‘orthodox’ line-up of the Caesars, Titian can pointedly stop his own series at number eleven, and outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, thirteen or fourteen anonymous stone figures have become probably the most famous set of ‘Roman emperors’ in the United Kingdom. Of course, there are many occasions when spotting the right emperor is important. (I hope I have shown that if we overlook the comatose ‘Vitellius’ in a heap of decadent Roman revellers, we may well miss the point of the whole painting.) But it should come as a relief to most of us that we are probably no worse at matching up the correct imperial names with the correct imperial faces than people in general have ever been. In fact, part of the dynamic fun of the images of the Caesars, part of the reason for their visual longevity, is that they are so hard to pin down. They are not a breed of iconographic fossils.
Emperors Now
No one now makes a beeline for the busts of Roman emperors when they enter the Uffizi, or any other museum. And—although we continue to debate how to represent figures from the past (what difference does it make if Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is played in togas, doublet and hose or the uniforms of some modern dictatorship?)—to clothe a contemporary portrait statue in a Roman outfit would come across as more than slightly ludicrous.5 The costume of ancient Rome no longer seems, as it did to Joshua Reynolds, a marker of timelessness, but more a marker of fancy dress; it belongs not to the world of commemorative sculpture, but to the world of the toga-party (Fig. 8.3).
Images of Roman emperors are certainly still all around us, in advertisements, newspapers and cartoons. But some would say that these have been reduced to banal shorthands, their range narrowed to a few familiar clichés. Nero and his ‘fiddle’ is by far the commonest and most instantly recognisable; but it is now less a meditation on power, more an off-the-peg symbol, deployed to criticise any politician whose mind seems not to be on the real problems of the moment (Fig. 1.18b). Such clichés are not so far away from that journalists’ parlour game which fills vacant column inches with speculation about which Roman emperor a particular US president, or UK prime minister, most resembles. My own answer, when queries along those lines now come to me, is usually ‘Elagabalus’, if only to unseat the enquirer with an emperor they haven’t heard of—and, as a bonus, to be able to direct them to Alma-Tadema’s great painting (Fig. 6.23).
It is all more complicated, however, than the final descent of a once challenging iconography into the realm of visual cliché. I would not claim that images of Roman emperors are more crucial elements in the art of the West now than they were two or three centuries ago. They are not. But if we look a little harder, we find that contemporary painting and sculpture are much more engaged with those ancient rulers than we assume. Salvador Dalí may be an extreme case, with his repeated images of the emperor Trajan, a fellow Spaniard whom he claimed as his ancestor—as well as fantasising that there was a prefiguration of the double helix of modern genetics in Trajan’s column.6 Other artists, though, have repeatedly returned to imperial heads as if to the originary site of Western portraiture, whether Julia Mamaea, the mother of Alexander Severus (from whom we started), or a one-eyed Augustus, chillingly rendered in chocolate (preserved with a combination of marble and acrylic) by Turkish artist Genco Gülan (Fig. 8.4a, b, and c). The Grimani Vitellius also continues to cast its shadow, nowhere more memorably than in the brilliantly overblown bust in gilt bronze by Medardo Rosso from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reducing the emperor to a large blob of fat (or, as the museum catalogue more politely puts it, ‘the facial features are characteristic of his fluid technique of modelling’7). By contrast, Jim Dine’s version some hundred years later has turned the marble statue into what appears to be a plausible flesh and blood human being (Fig. 8.4d and e). Andy Warhol very likely had an investment in this Vitellius too. So far as I know, he never used its distinctive face in his own work, but it almost certainly had an appeal for him. That is to say, when I was in Washington, DC in 2011, preparing the lectures that are the basis of this book, I wandered into an antique shop in Georgetown—and was surprised to be confronted with an exuberant, perhaps somewhat vulgar, large mahogany version of the Grimani Vitellius, looking as if it probably dated to the eighteenth century. I was examining it with what must have seemed like the attention of a potential buyer, when a member of staff approached to tell me that it had once been the property of Warhol. Assuming that was true (and not merely a canny sales ploy), we can only wonder whether the artist was aware how central the face of the Grimani Vitellius had been since the sixteenth century in the culture of visual replication—which was, after all, his own trademark.
8.1 Edmonia Lewis’s under life-size version (just over forty centimetres high) of the young Octavian (a), completed in 1873, is based on a Roman portrait sculpture in the Vatican (b), which in the nineteenth century was one of the most popular and widely reproduced images of the emperor.
8.2 This more than life-size statue of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis (even seated, the queen is over one and a half metres tall) was startling to its first viewers, for showing the dying body of the queen (rather than the moments immediately before her death). The sculpture itself has a curious and sad history. It was ‘lost’ for a century after its first exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, and resurfaced in a scrapyard in the 1980s (having spent part of the intervening period marking a horse’s grave).
8.3 President Franklin D. Roosevelt celebrated his fifty-second birthday in January 1934 with a toga-party in the White House. Whether or not he was troubled by the qualms of Andrew Jackson (p. 6), it is often claimed that this Roman theme was a wry joke by his staff and friends on the allegations that FDR was becoming a dictator.
But what of the use of images of emperors and their imperial stories in bigger debates about autocracy and corruption, or in facing more fundamental questions about the nature of representation itself? Artists are still making powerful interventions here. In an apparently playful collage, British sculptor Alison Wilding, for example, juxtaposes the almost ironically appropriate name of ‘Romulus Augustus’ (the teenager said to be the very last emperor to rule over the Western Roman Empire in the later fifth century CE), with that of ‘Saturnia Pavonia’, the ‘emperor moth’ (Fig. 8.5). But the key is that she made the geometrical image out of sliced up prints of the moth and of a coin of Romulus Augustus. If, in other words, the representation of Roman imperial power was first reconstructed in the Renaissance through coins—here Wilding captures its final destruction in the same form. Forty years earlier, in Nero Paints, Anselm Kiefer had taken destruction very differently, using the idea of Nero—as emperor and artist—to reflect on Nazi devastation in eastern Europe. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kiefer often engaged with Germany’s (in)ability to face its Nazi past. In this painting, a palette hovers over a devastated landscape, the brushes spurting flames as if themselves the agents of destruction (Fig. 8.6). It raises questions not only about the relationship between art and autocracy (Nero’s dying words were ‘What an artist the world is losing’), and about the role of any artist as both cause and witness of atrocity (do all artists ‘fiddle while Rome burns’?), but also about our obligation, uncomfortable as it may be, to understand the artist/autocrat. As Kiefer famously stated, ‘I do not identify with Nero or Hitler, but I have to re-enact what they did just a little bit, in order to understand the madness.’8
8.4 Modern imperial heads up to the twenty-first century:
(a) Julia Mamaea, a print, about thirty-five by thirty centimetres, by James Welling (2018)
(b) Julia Mamaea, a painting, about seventy-five by fifty-five centimetres, by Barbara Friedman (2012)
(c) Chocolate emperor (Augustus), in chocolate, plaster, marble and acrylic, sixty centimetres high, by Genco Gülan (2014)
(d) Emperor Vitellius in gilt bronze, just under life-size (thirty-four centimetres) by Medardo Rosso (1895)
(e) Head of Vitellius in charcoal, water colour and acrylic, just over a metre high, by Jim Dine (1996)
8.5 Alison Wilding’s 2017 collage, roughly thirty-seven centimetres square, not only plays on the idea of the ‘emperor moth’ (Saturnia pavonia) but also looks back to the Renaissance tradition of coin images: the collage is partly made out of sliced-up prints of a coin of Romulus Augustus (emperor 475–76).
8.6 On this large canvas of 1974, roughly two metres by three, Anselm Kiefer shows an artist’s palette set against a bleak and burning landscape; entitled Nero Paints, it raises questions, through its reference to the artist emperor, about the relationship between art, power and destruction.
But it is in the moving image over the last century or so that we have found the most intense, and most watched, debates about Roman autocracy and its relationship to our own ethics and politics. The main story of this book has drawn to a close around the time that cinema was becoming a leading medium of art and argument. Any sequel would have to focus on film, which at its very beginning was shaped by images of ancient Rome, its excesses, its moral conflicts, its political and religious controversies.9 It is here that we now find the wide engagement with these ancient dynasts, tyrants or benevolent rulers that I have traced, not only through the most elite works of art, but also through the cheaper versions of imperial images in mass-produced plaques or widely disseminated prints.
