Twelve Caesars, page 6
Julius Caesar also established a template for the future with an entirely new use of images. He was the first Roman to have his portrait systematically displayed on coinage. A few precedents for this had been set by the kings and queens who came after Alexander the Great in the Greek world, but in Rome itself only the imaginary portraits of long-dead heroes had ever featured on coin designs. It was Caesar who firmly set the tradition, lasting in many places until the present day, that the head of the living ruler belonged in the purses of his subjects.8 He was also the first to use multiple statues of himself to parade his image to the public in Rome and much further afield.
A tradition of portraiture at Rome went back long before Caesar, of course. It is now often seen as a distinctively Roman genre of art, embedded in the rituals and practices of Rome’s aristocracy and of Roman public life: images of ancestors were displayed at the funerals of the elite and were part of the furniture of their houses; statues of prominent individuals, bigwigs and benefactors, had for centuries stood in the public squares, temples and market places of the Roman world.9 In fact, in the Western tradition at least, the now common convention of allowing a marble head to stand for the whole body—‘a head the sculptor severs in one’s lifetime’ as Joseph Brodsky put it in his eerie poem on a bust of the emperor Tiberius—appears to have been a Roman innovation. In classical Greece, portraits had usually been full-length figures, and there were plenty of those in Rome too. But it was the Romans who made it seem (almost) natural that an image truncated at the neck or shoulders could stand for a person rather than a murder victim. In that sense, and others, our idea of the ‘portrait head’ goes back to Rome.10
Caesar was the first to go beyond this and to engineer the widespread replication of his image, hundreds of times over. Never before had portraits been used so concertedly to promote the visibility, omnipresence and power of a single person—in quantity and in strategic placing. One Roman historian, admittedly writing two hundred years later, reports a decree issued during his lifetime that there should be a statue of Caesar erected in every temple at Rome, and in every city of the Roman world; and Suetonius mentions that on particular occasions his image was carried in procession alongside those of the gods. Caesar’s head being placed on the shoulders of the statue of Alexander was only one loaded use of portraits among many.11
How, or by whom, all these images were produced is a mystery. I very much doubt that Caesar patiently posed for battalions of sculptors; maybe none of the portraits were done from life in the strictest sense of the term. And some of the claims about their vast numbers may well have been wishful thinking or scaremongering, or else reflected plans never carried out in the short time that he held power. Nonetheless it seems certain that portraits that were intended to be, and were generally taken as, ‘Julius Caesar’ spread across the Roman landscape as those of no single individual had ever done before. At least eighteen pedestals have been discovered in what is now Greece and Turkey, with inscriptions to show that they originally held a statue of Caesar put up while he was still alive; three more are known in the towns of Italy, and Arles and the other towns of Gaul may well have had their fair share too.12 And that tradition continued for centuries after his death. Across the Roman Empire, there were any number of attempts (sometimes much later) to commemorate in ‘portraits’ the man who gave his name to the long succession of Roman rulers. Perhaps those images of Caesar as conquering hero and proud ancestor of the imperial regime did something to assuage the grim precedent of his assassination that must have haunted many of the rulers who came after him.
There is no reason at all why some of these statues should not have survived to the present day—whether those sculpted during his lifetime (the ‘holy grails’), or the even more numerous later copies of them, or variations on the theme, that were created after his death. The tricky question is how we can recognise any such survival when we find it, and what would convince us that it was intended as a portrait of Caesar rather than of anyone else. Everything hangs on that.
Many of the obvious diagnostic clues that we might expect are now missing, or never existed. There are, to start with, no helpful labels. Not a single statue has ever been discovered still attached, or even adjacent, to a pedestal carrying his name (and if a bust has ‘Julius Caesar’ inscribed on its base, that is a strong indication that the bust—or the inscription—is modern). Nor do images of Roman rulers, unlike those of Christian saints, ever become associated with symbols that point to their identity. There was nothing like the keys of Saint Peter or the wheel of Saint Catherine for the Caesars. And their bodies never gave any hint of who they were. Whether the emperor concerned was thin or fat, tall or short, there was no reference to that in their full-length statues, which are more or less identical figures, clad in a toga, armour or heroic nudity. There are no portly Henry VIIIs, or hunched Richard IIIs. With Roman rulers everything comes down to the face.
From the moment antiquarians and artists half a millennium ago first started systematically to identify Roman portraits, to the moment the marble head was dragged out of the Rhône, all attempts in the modern world to pin down the face of Caesar have overwhelmingly relied on two key pieces of evidence. The first is Suetonius’s colourful and intimate description of the dictator’s appearance, complete with his ruses for disguising his baldness and his enthusiasm for depilation:
He is said to have been tall in stature, fair-skinned, with slender limbs, a rather full face, and sharp dark eyes.… He was particularly fastidious over his body image, so that not only was he carefully trimmed and shaved, but also, according to some critics, he used to pluck his body hair, while seeing his baldness as a terrible disfigurement, since he found it exposed him to the jibes of abusers. So, he used to comb forward his thinning hair from the crown of his head, and out of all the honours decreed to him by the senate and people, there was no other that he received and made use of more gladly than the right to wear a laurel wreath at all times.13
The second is the series of silver coins issued in early 44 BCE, showing him with that lined neck, Adam’s apple, a strategically placed wreath and his name spelled out around the edge (Fig. 2.3). The truth is that there are other coins with heads—not of Caesar at all, but of characters from Roman myth and history—that show similar distinguishing marks on neck and throat, not to mention coins depicting Caesar on which he looks decidedly different.14 But leaving such variants aside (as they are usually left, without an inconvenient second look), this memorable image has always claimed more authority than any other evidence as the baseline for identifying the bona fide face of Caesar.
To be fair, material of this kind puts us in a better position to identify Caesar and his successors than any other Roman characters ever; the faces of Cicero or the Scipios, or Virgil or Horace, are irretrievably lost to us in a way that the faces of the emperors are not entirely so; no Roman poets ended up on the coinage as British authors may, occasionally and controversially, end up on banknotes.15 Even so, there is no sophisticated modern technique that can precisely pinpoint an image of Caesar. If you want to claim a particular sculpted head as his portrait, all you can do is what has always been done: that is, try to match the candidate up to the canonical coin portraits and to the physical details highlighted by Suetonius. It is a subjective process of ‘compare and contrast’, relying as much on the rhetoric of persuasion (can you convince yourself, as much as anyone else, that you are right?) as on objective criteria. And it is much more difficult than any quick summary makes it seem.
Even supposing that Suetonius, who was writing a century and a half after Caesar’s death, actually knew what his subject had looked like, it is next to impossible to align any surviving image with Suetonius’s description. That is partly because the details he highlights—the colour, the texture, even the thinning hair—do not convert easily into marble. (It may be reassuring to know that men have been ‘combing over’ to conceal their baldness for two thousand years, but how exactly would you expect a sculptor to represent the trick?) But it is also because Suetonius’s Latin is in places ambiguous. The phrase that I have translated as ‘a rather full face’ (ore paulo pleniore) could equally well mean ‘a disproportionately large mouth’, which would send us on the hunt for a very different set of features.16 In any case, neither translation comfortably fits the portraits on the coins, where Caesar seems if anything rather gaunt, and has a perfectly ordinary sized mouth. And those coins present their own problems. As antiquarians already saw more than two hundred years ago, the process of comparison between a tiny two-dimensional head, not much more than a centimetre tall, and a life-size portrait in the round, is extremely tricky. Winckelmann (just before reporting Cardinal Albani’s general scepticism on portraits of Caesar) admitted that he could not find any sculptures that he thought were a close enough match for the coins. But at least one fellow connoisseur at the time went further: he more or less implied that it was not simply a question of finding a satisfying resemblance, but more fundamentally of deciding what exactly would count as a resemblance between these two very different media.17
So how does this work out in practice? Intriguing as these dilemmas about method are, they hardly prepare us for the ferocity of the debates over rival sculptures of ‘Caesar’, for the hyperbole of the claims made in their favour or for the impact of the discussion far beyond the world of professional archaeologists, artists and collectors. (Benito Mussolini is only one infamous ‘celebrity’ with a stake in these controversies, and there are unexpected Bonapartist connections too.) The story of two pieces, in particular, that were in turn the favourite candidates for the authentic face of Caesar from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, illustrate the surprising twists and turns of scholarly fashion and the sometimes learned, sometimes implausible arguments mounted on different sides. They help us to think harder about how modern viewers over the centuries have learned to see Caesar.
Pros and Cons
Apart from the coins, more than a hundred and fifty portraits have at one time or other been seriously claimed to be ancient Roman images of Julius Caesar (the number varying according to how stringently you take the word ‘seriously’). They are mostly in marble, but there are some candidates on gems too, and in ceramic.18 They are now found in collections across the Western world, from Sparta, Greece to Berkeley, California, and a few have emerged from improbable places. The head from the Rhône is not the only one to have been discovered in a river. Another specimen, whose current home is a museum outside Stockholm, was mysteriously dredged up in 1925 from three metres of mud in the bed of the Hudson, by 23rd Street in New York: it must somehow have been ‘lost’ overboard from a boat carrying a cargo from Europe (my inverted commas convey my puzzlement about the circumstances), rather than be stunning proof of all those claims that the Romans really had reached America (Fig. 2.4a).19 Out of this number, there are hardly any whose identification or authenticity has never been questioned. One such is a marble head found along with other recognisably imperial portraits in 2003 in excavations on the island of Pantelleria, between Sicily and North Africa, in what seems to have been a later dynastic group, including a retrospective ‘portrait’ of Caesar as its founding father (hence the greater than usual certainty about who it is); but in time this too may well find its challengers (Fig. 2.4b).20 Almost every single other piece has been periodically under fire: either on the grounds that, while it may be ancient, it is certainly not Caesar, or because, while there is little doubt that it is intended to be Caesar, it is certainly not ancient, but a modern replica, version or fake.21
The conflicting claims can be baffling in their variety. The head from the Hudson, for example, has also been thought to be Augustus or his right-hand man Agrippa, alternatively Sulla (the notoriously murderous despot of the early first century BCE) or now more often just another ‘unknown Roman’. Particularly hard to pin down has been the ‘Green Caesar’, once a prized possession of Frederick II of Prussia, now in Berlin, and named for the distinctive Egyptian green stone from which it is made. Where it was found is entirely unknown, but its Egyptian connections have proved hard to resist. Is it, as one writer has recently hoped on almost no evidence at all, the very statue that Cleopatra put up in honour of Caesar in Alexandria after his death? Is it perhaps no more than a portrait of ‘one of Caesar’s admirers from the Nile’, aping the style of his hero? Or is it actually an eighteenth-century fake, but intended to pass for Caesar all along? Who knows?22 (Fig. 2.4c)
Among all these Caesars, some have earned more fame than others, and at different periods. One early favourite was the ‘true portrait’ housed in the sixteenth century in the palazzo of the Casale family in Rome. According to a remarkable contemporary guidebook, written when its author, Ulisse Aldrovandi from Bologna, was detained in Rome under the Inquisition, this bust’s owner kept it under lock and key, but would show it to visitors ‘lovingly’. (If it is the same bust of Caesar still in the collection of the Casale descendants, it is now often reckoned that this prized possession was no antique at all, but only a century or so old at the time.)23 (Fig. 2.4d)
In the 1930s, Mussolini brought to prominence a full-length Caesar that used to stand in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline hill in Rome. This had once been much admired by travellers to the city and was one of only two Caesars accepted as incontrovertibly ‘Caesarian’ by another of those hard-headed critics in the late eighteenth century. It later fell from favour under the usual whiff of suspicion that it might be a modern, seventeenth-century pastiche: in this case, needlessly (true, there has been a lot of ‘work’ done to the arms and legs, but a sketch of it dated to 1550 knocks on the head the idea that it was a seventeenth-century creation). In any case, no such doubts prevented Mussolini from making it his own trademark image of Caesar, and the symbol of his ambitions to follow in the footsteps of the Roman dictator.24 ‘Il Duce’, as Mussolini was known, had the sculpture moved from its home in the Conservatori courtyard to give it pride of place in the Roman city council chamber in the next-door Palazzo Senatorio, where it still presides over discussions of planning regulations and parking fines. In a programme uncannily reminiscent of the replication of Caesar’s statues two thousand years earlier, he also had copies of it made to stand both in Rimini in northern Italy, from where Caesar had launched his final bid for power in Rome, and next to his brand new highway in the centre of Rome (via dell’Impero, or ‘Empire Street’, as it was then known; later renamed, after the adjacent archaeological remains, via dei Fori Imperiali, or ‘Street of the Imperial Fora’) (Fig. 2.5).25
2.4
(a) The ‘Caesar’ from the Hudson River
(b) Julius Caesar (mid-first century CE) from Pantelleria
(c) The Green Caesar, assumed to originate in Egypt
(d) The Julius Caesar now in the Casali Collection in Rome
(e) Head of Caesar from Vicenzo Camuccini, Death of Caesar (1806)
(f) Head often identified as Caesar, by Desiderio da Settignano (c. 1460)
2.5 Benito Mussolini announces the abolition of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, in March 1936. Appropriately enough he spoke directly in front of the statue of Julius Caesar, which he had ordered to be moved to this council chamber: one dictator in front of another.
But the clearest insight into what the modern world has been searching for (and sometimes inventing) in images of Caesar, and into the strange narratives that can lie behind mute sculptures on museum shelves, comes in two marble heads that one after the other became the defining images of Caesar: one in the British Museum in London, the other in the Archaeological Museum in Turin. Almost any surviving sculpture of ‘Caesar’ has some similar, if lower-key, story attached (a succession of authentication, de-authentication, admiration and disdain); but this pair illustrate better than any others some of the most vivid disputes that ‘Caesars’ can provoke.
The first was bought by the British Museum in 1818, among a group of objects acquired from James Millingen, a British collector and dealer in Italian antiquities (Fig. 2.6).26 Where, or how, it was discovered is not recorded, and it was not at first treated as anything special, being assumed cautiously to be an ‘unknown head’. But about 1846, according to the Museum’s hand-written catalogue, it was re-identified as a portrait of Julius Caesar.27 Who did this, and on what grounds, is a mystery (presumably the similarity to coin portraits came into the argument somewhere). But for decades this image held sway as the Caesar of modernity’s dreams. It illustrated biographies of the dictator, it appeared on any number of book jackets and it prompted what in hindsight seems embarrassingly extravagant prose.
In 1892, a particularly gushing encomium came from Sabine Baring-Gould, best-selling British author, Anglican clergyman and a man remembered more now as a hymn writer (‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ was his most famous anthem) than as a Roman historian. He conceded that the artist might have overlooked Caesar’s baldness, and that he probably did not sculpt the portrait from life (a disappointment that lurks in the background of many of these discussions). But it was certainly ‘done by a man who knew Julius Caesar well, who had seen him over and over again, and had been so deeply impressed by his personality that he has given us a better portrait of the man than if he had done it from life.… he caught and reproduced those peculiarities of his expression which Caesar’s face had when in repose, the sweet, sad, patient smile, the reserve of power in the lips, and that far-off look into the heavens, as of one searching the unseen, and trusting in the Providence that reigned there.’28 Soon after, Thomas Rice Holmes, another passionate Caesarian, followed a similar line at the start of his history of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul: ‘The bust represents, I venture to say, the strongest personality that has ever lived.… In the profile it is impossible to detect a flaw.… He has lived every day of his life, and he is beginning to weary of the strain, but every faculty retains its fullest vigour.… The man looks perfectly unscrupulous; or … he looks as if no scruple could make him falter in pursuit of his aim.’29 John Buchan too, classicist, diplomat and author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, writing in the 1930s called it ‘the noblest presentment of the human countenance known to me’ even if he struck a different chord from the others in admiring ‘the fine, almost feminine, moulding of the lips and chin’. ‘Caesar’, he insisted, ‘is the only great man of action, save Nelson, who has in his face something of a woman’s delicacy.’30
