Twelve Caesars, page 22
Far from the highlights of Julius Caesar’s career, Henry’s tapestries were a visual depiction of civil war, seen through the eyes of a dissident ancient poet who was a casualty of the imperial regime—as a second look at them makes absolutely clear.37
What first alerted me to Lucan as the inspiration behind the tapestries were the scenes supposed to depict the soothsayer Spurinna predicting the death of Caesar. This was, to be sure, a well-known incident in Caesar’s life story, unequivocally identified by the caption woven above one of the surviving versions; the captions on the others are more garbled.38 But it could not possibly have been designed as that—for the simple reason that Spurinna was a man,39 and a venerable soothsayer or diviner (haruspex in Latin) at that. The main figure here is definitely female, and—complete with snakes, bats and cauldron—every inch a witch. She can only be one of the most famous and lurid characters of Lucan’s Pharsalia: Erictho, the terrifying necromancer from Thessaly in northern Greece (in the tapestries she is even wearing a trademark Thessalian-style hat), who preys on corpses and conjures the powers of the underworld.40 What is depicted here is the moment in the poem when Pompey’s son comes to consult her about the outcome of his father’s war against Caesar—and she orchestrates, with the help of a temporarily revivified corpse, a prophecy of Pompey’s imminent defeat.
In labelling this as ‘Spurinna’, modern scholars have been misled not only by their own unfamiliarity with Lucan’s Pharsalia (and with Spurinna’s gender), but also by the confident misidentification on one of the tapestries themselves. A big mystery of tapestry production is who was responsible for these captions, with what degree of care or learning they operated and how the texts were transmitted, or adapted, over different generations of weaving. Why they got it wrong in this case is unclear (whether unfamiliarity with the original source, or a more constructive attempt actively to reinterpret the scene). But one thing is clear: van Aelst, who originally designed the scene, must have had Lucan’s Erictho in mind.
From there, much of the rest falls into place. Another equally classic, and now equally unrecognised, moment in the Pharsalia is reflected in three descendant tapestries (one at Powis Castle in Wales, where it still hangs not far from the line-up of imperial busts; the others popping up in salerooms) (Fig 6.13). Two of their captions refer to this scene of battle as Caesar ‘killing a giant’, the other as Caesar ‘leading an attack’.41 The problem is that, among all his different exploits, there is no reference whatsoever in the history or legend of Julius Caesar to any fight with a giant, though he may on occasion have led an attack (as the sculptor John Deare imagined). But there is an easy solution. For here—although no modern art historian seems to have noticed—the smaller fighter (the ‘Caesar’ against ‘the giant’) is standing on top of a large pile of dead bodies. If you know the Pharsalia, this is an obvious pointer to van Aelst’s intended subject: the bravery of one of Caesar’s soldiers, Cassius Scaeva, during the siege of Pompey’s camp at Dyrrachium (near modern Durres in Albania) before the final battle of Pharsalus. In order to prevent Pompey’s troops breaking out, Scaeva threw down from Caesar’s siege wall the corpses of his own fallen comrades and fought the enemy from the top of this grisly pile (‘he did not know how great a crime bravery is in a civil war’, observed Lucan darkly). In the end, shot in the eye by a crack archer from the Pompeian side (the ‘gigantic’ figure shown here), he pulled the arrow out and continued to fight. It is this scene of disconcerting ‘heroism’ that is shown here, nothing to do with giants, or with the more generic ‘Caesar leading an attack’, at all.42
The only tapestry in the series that can have nothing to do with the Pharsalia is that of Caesar’s assassination (the poem is unfinished and breaks off before that point, even supposing the story was ever intended to get that far). Everything else that is identifiable—even if sometimes mentioned by other ancient writers also—can be traced directly back to Lucan’s narrative. The Breaking into the Treasury was one of his famous set pieces, so too the Crossing of the Rubicon (the female figure at the water’s edge is one of Lucan’s distinctive details not found elsewhere), and the Murder of Pompey, treacherously decapitated as he landed in Egypt, a lurid version of which also survives at Powis Castle.43
Just occasionally, muddled as they often are, the woven captions have kept alive the links to the Pharsalia. One set of tapestries, for example, depicts Pompey taking sad leave of his wife Cornelia, before going off to join battle with Caesar, a rare moment of tenderness in an otherwise brutal poem. Most modern critics, and early modern caption writers, have misinterpreted this as Caesar saying goodbye to his wife, but one woven caption correctly identifies it: ‘Pompey the Great makes for his camp; Cornelia sadly sails to the island of Lesbos …’ (and in another version of the scene, where the caption misidentifies the main figure as Caesar, in the image itself the logo of Pompey’s side, ‘SPQR’—‘the Senate and People of Rome’—remains visible on the standards behind the general).44 In yet another case, even a direct quotation from Lucan has been missed. Above a woven scene showing the battle of Pharsalus itself, the caption begins ‘Proelia … plusqua
6.13 The caption on this seventeenth-century descendant (over four metres wide) of one of Henry VIII’s tapestries at Powis Castle describes the scene as ‘Caesar making an attack’. But the details of the image itself—a soldier fighting on top of a pile of dead bodies, a marksman taking aim at him—make it clear that the original designer had a notable story from Lucan’s Pharsalia in mind. It shows Caesar’s soldier Cassius Scaeva fighting off the opposition from the top of a grisly pile of corpses, and being shot in the eye by one of Pompey’s troops.
What combination of ignorance, misunderstanding and determined reinterpretation turned a cycle of tapestries that recreated the story of Lucan’s Pharsalia into the ‘key events in Caesar’s career’ is impossible to know. It was a process, as the captions on the tapestries and the entries in the inventories make clear, that went back far beyond the endeavours of modern art historians to, at least, the later sixteenth century. But there can be no doubt that when the staff of Henry VIII unpacked the cases that arrived from Brussels, containing one of the most expensive works of art the king ever purchased, what they saw was a series of depictions of the dark epic conflict that had heralded one-man rule in Rome, and paved the way for a dictatorship that ended with Caesar’s assassination. Was there a lesson in this?
Negative Reactions
It would be simplistic to imagine that the scenes on Henry’s tapestries were taken to be a straightforward attack on monarchical rule. I am certainly not suggesting—amusing as the thought is—that there were red faces all round as the staff wondered how to explain the unexpected message of the new purchase to His Majesty. We know nothing about the commissioning process, or about the input of Henry himself. But there is no reason to suppose that he or his advisers did not get what they were expecting, or had even asked for.
Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Lucan’s poem had been popular at least among the European elite (albeit not on the scale of Ovid or Virgil), and we find several different, and to us sometimes unfamiliar, approaches to it. Not until the second half of the seventeenth century did the now standard political readings begin to dominate. One thirteenth-century adaptation of the poem into vernacular French, Jean du Thuin’s Hystore de Jules César, turned Caesar into a chivalrous knightly hero and his relationship with Cleopatra (a major theme in the last, unfinished book of the Pharsalia) into a triumph of courtly romance. This may, indirectly, have set the scene for dozens of later operas (most famously Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto) but it required radical alterations to Lucan’s version to construct an almost entirely new story. Less surprising are the many readers who saw the poem as a dire warning not of tyranny but of the dangers of civil war—a welcome lesson in Tudor England, for certain.46
That said, even if many interpretations were in play, the unsettling version of one-man rule embedded in these images is not easily explained away. It is hard to imagine, as some have, that—whatever their source—they were meant as a practical lesson for Henry’s young son Edward, or as some kind of reassurance for the king himself (dressing up, for example, his hugely profitable dissolution of the monasteries as if it were the equivalent of Caesar breaking into the treasury).47 The contrast with the scenes drawn from Suetonius on the Aldobrandini Tazze, made just a few decades later, underlines the point. Instead of omens pledging the successful transmission of imperial power, this series of tapestries offers the prediction of defeat made by a witch who dabbles in corpses. If the only view of imperial death on the tazze was the brave suicide of Otho, here van Aelst has focussed on the bloody murder of each of the protagonists. Whichever side you are on, the end is bad.
The combination, and repetition, of such negative images reinforces the unease. Imagine someone wandering around Hampton Court in the early years of the eighteenth century, whether resident or visitor, staff or monarch. In theory at least (depending on who was allowed where, of course) they have would have been able to see some of the tapestries still in place, and within a stone’s throw not only the ‘King’s Staircase’ with its emperors posing as failed dinner guests but also Mantegna’s subtle warnings of overweening power. Whatever conclusions they drew, it is another warning for us against seeing modern images of Roman emperors as uniformly and—for those in power—reassuringly positive. Of course, many, as we have already seen, were just that. Yet, in Hampton Court, that most monarchical of modern settings, the images on the walls were doing something more complicated: they were prompting a dialogue between a negative, or ambivalent, presentation of Roman imperial power and the power of the modern king; they were raising questions about how far it was possible to see modern monarchy reflected in the ancient; and they maybe even provided a lens through which the modern monarch could face up to monarchy’s discontents.
Imperial Vices and Imperial History
Inside and outside royal palaces, and for a wider audience, images of the power of Roman emperors have always gone hand in hand with the portrayal of their personal vices—and with the hint of the systemic corruption of the imperial regime of which those vices were a symbol. That idea was written indelibly into the history of Christianity, with persecution of the Christians by Nero and other pagan rulers being a staple of image-making from the twelfth-century stained glass at Poitiers (Fig. 1.6), up to the pious paintings and lurid films of more recent decades. But it extends in different directions, much further than religion.
Aegidius Sadeler was not the only commercial printmaker to suggest an alternative view of the virtues of the Caesars, in the poems that lurked beneath the images. The imperial portraits designed by another Flemish artist, Jan van der Straet (usually known as Stradanus), and reproduced in large numbers by more than one engraver in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, offered a similarly hostile vision of the emperors (Fig. 6.14). In these prints too, the accompanying Latin verses saw the worst in almost every emperor concerned, and not only the usual villains. It is not surprising that Nero is said to have been a ruler who would have been better off sticking to his lyre and keeping out of politics (wielding the plectrum not the sceptrum, as the poem quips). But Augustus is also denounced for blurring the lines between himself and the gods, an error revealed when (as one colourful but improbable variant on his death story went) he was murdered by his wife Livia: ‘when you
On these prints, however, the hostility is not only inscribed in the verses. Behind each of their portraits there are scenes from the life of the Caesar; and in some versions—where the emperor on horseback is depicted as if he were an equestrian statue—yet more scenes are engraved on the pedestal. The emphasis in these is overwhelmingly on death, destruction, imperial sadism and excess. In the background to the figure of Augustus, for example, matching the claims made in the poem, is the notorious ‘Banquet of the Twelve Gods’, at which—sporting a fancy dress that his enemies deemed close to sacrilege—he is supposed to have impersonated the god Apollo; and on the front of his pedestal is what must be Livia offering her husband a deadly poisoned fig. On the front of Domitian’s there is the unmistakable figure of the young emperor skewering flies with his pen.49
6.14 Two of Jan van der Straet’s emperors, in a late sixteenth-century engraving by Adriaen Collaert: (a) Augustus; in the background the notorious banquet at which he dressed up as the god Apollo; on the pedestal, the naval battle of Actium (at which he defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra) and Livia feeding him a poisoned fig; (b) Domitian; in the background on the right, his assassination; on the front of the pedestal, he skewers flies; the verses accuse him of being ‘the foulest blot on his family’ and of ‘killing the innocent for no reason’.
That same image of juvenile cruelty is captured in some curious sketches made by Rubens, in the early years of the seventeenth century. Rubens is well known for his antiquarian interests and for his imperial portraits, from the single Julius Caesar that he contributed to a ‘multi-artist’ series of the Twelve to possibly two other line-ups of different imperial groups, which now survive partly as originals, and partly reconstructed from copies.50 These portraits range from austere portrayals, in the case of Caesar, to something more fleshy, more human and slightly irreverent. But none are nearly as irreverent as the sketches of emperors that cover two sides of a single sheet of paper now in Berlin.51
These sketches may partly have been informal working drawings for some bigger project. Next to Julius Caesar, for example, identified by the phrase veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered), Rubens has written sine fulmine (without thunderbolt), as if still in the process of deciding what attributes to give him. But some of them seem also to have taken on a life of their own as humorous caricatures. On the other side of the paper (Fig. 6.15) an almost laughably thuggish Vespasian is identified by what was once, according to Suetonius, his common nickname, mulio (mule-driver), while young Domitian is stabbing flies (ne musca, wrote Rubens, following the quip reported by Suetonius that ‘not even a fly’ is keeping him company).52 Whatever the ultimate purpose of these drawings, they remind us—like that fourteenth-century caricature under the plaster in Verona (Fig. 1.16)—that even those who produced some of the most serious and sober images of imperial power might simultaneously carry in their heads an alternative, more down-to-earth or comical, vision of the Roman emperors.
6.15 Rubens’s imperial caricatures, drawn on a piece of paper (roughly twenty by forty centimetres), c. 1598–1600. Vespasian is shown twice on the left-hand side (once, above, with reference to his buildings; below with the phrase ‘consul nicknamed mule-driver’). Titus faces him, with a reference to his victory over the Jews (and apparently a note to the artist himself to ‘check if the emperor carries a military staff on Trajan’s column’). On the right are two versions of Domitian, one aiming at a fly, with the phrase ‘ne musca’—‘not even a fly (is keeping him company)’.
But it was a couple of hundred years later that artists started to explore even more systematically, more subtly, more quizzically and more pointedly these failings of Roman emperors and of the political and social system they symbolised. And it is from this period that we have much richer access to some of the less than reverential reactions to images of imperial power, however reverentially those images might (or might not) have been intended. This was in the context of a very different world of art and its institutions. Paintings were not only produced, and survived, in far greater numbers and stylistic variety than ever before (by the 1850s, thousands of new works were displayed each year in Paris alone, making any kind of generalisation treacherous); but it was also a world of galleries, public exhibitions, academies, new forms of teaching, a wider range of patrons and buyers, a cacophony of ideological disputes and a new chorus of art criticism, commentary and journalism—which opens up to us a whole range of contemporary discussions, impossible to explore before.
At first sight, the canvases of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are second only to rows of marble busts as the popular image of ‘Romans in the modern world’. They recreate scenes drawn from Roman history or myth (side by side with those drawn from ancient Greece, modern nationalist myths and what are now little-known by-ways of the Bible), often on a colossal scale, and supposedly for edifying purposes. Exemplum virtutis (an example of admirable conduct) was one of the catchphrases often prompted by these ‘history paintings’ as they were usually called—an artistic genre that may be numbing for modern gallery visitors but for decades stood at the very top of the hierarchy set by European academies of art (above such ‘secondary’ genres as landscape, or smaller paintings on other themes).53 But at the time they provoked a far more mixed reaction than is often imagined.
