Twelve Caesars, page 4
1.20 One of Giovanni da Cavino’s sixteenth-century bronze ‘Paduans’, just over three centimetres in diameter. On one side a portrait of Antonia, the mother of the emperor Claudius; on the other, her son the emperor, dressed for religious ritual, with his name (Ti[berius] Claudius Caesar) and his imperial titles around the edge. ‘S C’, short for ‘senatus consulto’, marks the authority of the senate in minting Roman coins of this type.
Critics and restorers themselves, from the sixteenth century on, debated the role of restoration in completing fragmentary ancient sculpture. How many modern additions and improvements were legitimate? How far was the restorer to be seen as an artist in his own right?34 But, in some portraits, hybridity became an end in itself. In the Capitoline Museums at Rome (standing, as it has done for centuries, in a grand room on the first floor of the Palazzo dei Conservatori) is a full-length figure in marble, the body clad in armour of Roman imperial type, arm outstretched as if to address his legions; the head, by contrast, in the fashion of a sixteenth-century dynast, appears to have come from another age (Fig. 1.21). And indeed it has. This is a statue of the warlord Alessandro Farnese (Il Gran Capitano as he was known, ‘The Great Captain’, or even ‘Big Boss’), erected in 1593, the year after his death. The body was formed out of an ancient Roman statue, said at the time to be of Julius Caesar, its head completely replaced with the distinctive features of Il Gran Capitano.
There may have been practical reasons for this. To our eyes now, the amalgam appears awkward (and very few visitors today stop to admire it). But it meant a very speedy and cheap commission, as the records of the payment to the sculptor make clear. More to the point, though, it was also a powerful visual way of parading a link between the modern hero and the ancient past. The comparison of Alessandro Farnese with Caesar had already been made in a eulogy at his funeral. Here that comparison was monumentalised in marble.35
1.21 Both ancient and modern. The portrait head of Alessandro Farnese by the sculptor Ippolito Buzzi (d. 1634) has been inserted into the life-size body of an ancient statue believed to be that of Julius Caesar. As if to underline the connections between this sixteenth-century warlord and Roman antiquity, his portrait stood (and still stands) in front of a painting of a famous military victory from the myths of early Rome.
There were ancient Roman precedents for this practice. Caesar could hardly have complained at his treatment by those who wanted (literally) to ‘deface’ and ‘reface’ his portrait to honour some sixteenth-century follower. Centuries earlier, his own admirers had done much the same. By the end of the first century CE, on a famous statue of Alexander the Great that stood in the centre of Rome the head of Julius Caesar had been substituted for the original, as if to put the Roman conqueror firmly in the tradition of his Greek predecessor: to place Caesar, if not in Alexander’s shoes, then at least on his neck.36 In both cases—Caesar and Il Gran Capitano—viewers were meant to keep the old and the new simultaneously in their sights: this was art ancient-and-modern.
Imperial Connections: From Napoleon and His Mother to the Last Supper
There is, however, an even more complicated, more subtle and trickier tradition of introducing the imperial faces of ancient Rome into modern portraiture and into modern art more generally. This has sometimes rebounded on the artist or sitter concerned. But modern viewers can lose a lot of the rich layers of meaning if they fail to spot it. A particularly pointed (and notorious) example of this is Antonio Canova’s portrait sculpture of Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Bonaparte (‘Madame Mère’ as she was often known), commissioned by the lady herself in 1804.
Canova did not literally take his chisel to an ancient work of art. But he made much the same point as the sculptor who ‘re-faced’ Julius Caesar to create ‘The Big Boss’, for he based his figure very closely on an ancient statue that now sits, as it has for two centuries, in the middle of the ‘Room of the Emperors’ in the Palazzo Nuovo of the Capitoline Museums in Rome; at the time this was confidently identified as ‘Agrippina’, a woman at the centre of the imperial family in the first century CE (Fig. 1.22).37 Some contemporary critics missed the significance; it was a case, they judged, where the fine boundary between creative imitation and straightforward copying was too fine for comfort, and they accused Canova of plagiarism. Others saw that it raised bigger questions: who exactly was the ‘Agrippina’ depicted in the ancient statue, and so with whom was Madame Mère being linked, and with what message?
Part of the puzzle went back to the fact that there were two prominent Agrippinas in the imperial family of the first century, stereotyped in very different ways. One was the virtuous, if sometimes tediously uncompromising, granddaughter of the emperor Augustus and wife of the popular imperial prince Germanicus, who defended her husband’s memory after his gruesome murder (masterminded, it was claimed, by the jealous emperor Tiberius); she was later exiled, tortured and in 33 CE starved herself, or was starved, to death. The other was her villainous daughter—Agrippina ‘the Younger’ to distinguish her from ‘the Elder’—the wife of the emperor Claudius, whom she reputedly dispatched in 54 CE with a dish of poisoned mushrooms, and the mother, incestuous lover, and eventually murder victim of the emperor Nero. (There is more on this pair in Chapter 7.)
Opinions were sharply divided, usually according to the political sympathies of the critic concerned, on whether it was the paragon or the villain who was the subject of the ancient statue and so the model for Madame Mère. But whichever way it went, the implications were bleak for Napoleon, her son. For what both Agrippinas, the villainous and the virtuous, had in common were their truly monstrous offsprings: the emperor Nero in the case of the Younger, the emperor Caligula in the case of the Elder. Not a few commentators implied that Canova’s target had been Napoleon himself. It was a classic instance of the inseparability of the ancient and the modern (the whole point was not to plagiarise, but to align Madame Mère with a Roman model); and it was another case where such an alignment brought its own controversies and unwelcome political implications. It was the ‘Andrew Jackson dilemma’ writ large.38
In 1818 after the fall of Napoleon, the sixth Duke of Devonshire—an eager collector of contemporary sculpture and a particularly fervent admirer of Canova, with the money to indulge his passions—purchased the statue of Madame Mère in Paris. The subject herself was none too pleased about the sale (‘ rather complained of my possessing her statue’, the duke admitted—or boasted). But, whatever the bad feeling, it became one of the highlights of his collection, installed in his palace at Chatsworth, in northern England—where, so he wrote in his own guidebook to the property, he would pay nocturnal visits to the statue ‘by lamplight’.39
It has been in Chatsworth ever since, admired as a masterpiece of Canova, and given extra celebrity from its Napoleonic links (the plinth on which it stands blazons the Latin words, in large capitals, ‘Napoleonis Mater’, ‘Mother of Napoleon’). But whatever the duke may have made of the sculpture’s antique precedents, for most visitors its connections with either Agrippina have long been forgotten, and with those connections a large part of the interest, peculiarity and meaning of the statue has been lost too. A controversial work of art that once exposed some of the awkward questions about imperial character, dynasty and power has settled into a much blander role, as an accomplished portrait combined with a Napoleonic souvenir.
There is a huge amount to gain by putting those classical connections back, both here and elsewhere. It is often, and rightly, said that much of the art produced before the late nineteenth century, in the West at least—I do not want to foist this preoccupation on the rest of the world—must necessarily remain opaque to those who do not have a reasonable knowledge of the Bible and of the classical myths recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a Roman poem, in several volumes, which for centuries held nearly biblical status in artists’ studios).40 That is almost as true for knowledge of the most prominent Roman emperors, their vices and virtues, their power politics and the once well-known anecdotes told about them that were part of the cultural hinterland of artists, patrons and viewers in the past.
1.22 Canova courted danger in modelling his portrait of Napoleon’s mother, Madame Mère, so closely on the life-size statue of ‘Agrippina’ now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. Was it the ‘good Agrippina’ or the monster of the same name? And what, if anything, did that say about the sitter or her son? The irony is that modern art historians are certain that the figure in Rome could not possibly have been a portrait of either Agrippina; on grounds of style and technique alone, it must belong a couple of centuries later (below, p. 137). But partly thanks to Canova, the mistaken identity lingers.
Of course, we should not exaggerate. There have always been plenty of people who did not know or care anything about the ancient classical world, or did not have the time, inclination, resources or cultural capital to engage with these ancient rulers and their stories, any more than with curiosities of Ovid. Even if Classics was never quite so exclusively the privilege of rich white males as is often claimed (the British tradition, for example, of working-class Classics is a rich one41), the classical heritage never is, or was, the be-all and end-all. The fact remains, though, that much of European art speaks to us in more interesting, complicated and surprising ways if we do engage with that heritage, emperors included.
Some of this comes down, as with the sarcophagus of Alexander Severus, to the nuts and bolts of identification and interpretation. As we shall discover, there are some very odd cases of mistaken identity to be uncovered, and (like the gaudy ceramics I touched on) once proud sets of imperial figures, now dispersed across the world and unrecognised, to be tracked down and reassembled. There is Latin, on tapestries and prints, that has been garbled, misunderstood or simply unread for an embarrassingly long time. But we shall also find more unexpected ways in which the story of Roman emperors adds meaning to works of art—even to some which, like the portrait of Madame Mère, appear at first sight to have little or nothing directly to do with Roman imperial history at all.
Another striking case of that is Paolo Veronese’s controversial Last Supper, painted for a religious order in Venice in 1573 and tactically renamed The Feast in the House of Levi, after the Inquisition objected to the inclusion of some elements—such as jesters, drunkards and Germans—that were, at the very least, highly unorthodox for a Catholic Last Supper (Fig. 1.23). On the front plane of the canvas, Veronese gave considerable prominence to a portly steward or, as the painter himself called him, un scalco (a carver). Dressed in a bright striped tunic, the man stands apparently transfixed, as he gazes intently across at Jesus.42 It can hardly be a coincidence that this carver’s facial features are modelled on an ancient Roman portrait then on display in Venice, universally believed at the time to depict the emperor Vitellius, whose assassination was two and a half centuries later to be the subject set for the young French artists competing for the Prix de Rome.
1.23 This vast painting, more than thirteen metres across, was made for the refectory of a Venetian friary. Though Jesus takes the centre place at table, the figure that catches the eye in the foreground is Veronese’s ‘carver’, a look-alike Emperor Vitellius. The same Vitellius also lies behind the features of the man in green, sitting near the column at the top of the stairs on the left.
Known as the ‘Grimani Vitellius’ (after Cardinal Domenico Grimani, who bequeathed it to the city on his death in 1523), it was very popular with artists and draughtsmen, replicated hundreds of times over (Fig. 1.24). It is a plaster cast of this very sculpture that the boy in Fig. 1.10 is carefully drawing, and it also appears to be the basis for one of the smaller figures in the background of Veronese’s Last Supper.43 But those who knew something of the reputation of this walk-on part in imperial history could not have failed to spot some meaningful irony here, in addition to a convenient artistic model. For in this painting, a look-alike Vitellius, reputedly one of the most cruelly immoral of all Roman rulers, albeit on the throne for only a few months, has been shown enthralled by the sight of Jesus. But more than that, an emperor whose gluttony was said to have been a match for any of the notorious over-eaters of Roman history (the word ‘Vitellian’ until recently being a synonym for ‘gastronomically lavish’), has been converted into a carver, or steward. The tables, in other words, have been turned from consumer to server.
Those who were better informed about Vitellius’s family might even have spotted a further resonance with the Christian story. For it was none other than the father of this Vitellius—one Lucius Vitellius—who as Roman governor of Syria became the nemesis of Pontius Pilate, dismissing him from his post in Judaea in 36 CE, a few years after the events depicted in the painting.44 It is as if this anachronistic imperial likeness (the emperor was actually still in his teens at the time of the Last Supper) was incorporated into the biblical scene to act as a wry internal commentary on Veronese’s own work and pointing to further depths in its characters and narrative. It is a pity to miss them.
Suetonius and His Twelve Caesars
Veronese and his contemporaries mostly knew their Vitellius, directly or indirectly, through the ancient Life of him that was written in the second century CE by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. It was here they would have found many of the lurid tales of his gluttony and immorality (a partiality to flamingo tongues and pheasant brains, for example, as well as to watching executions). Suetonius had experienced the imperial court from the inside, serving as librarian and general secretary to the emperor Hadrian, before falling from favour in a scandal that was said to have involved Hadrian’s wife, Sabina. The Life of Vitellius was just one of a series of biographies of the first Twelve Caesars, in which the biographer charted the story of the first century and a half of one-man rule at Rome: starting with the ‘dictatorship’ and then assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, then the Lives of the five emperors of the first imperial dynasty (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero), followed by those of the three short-lived contenders for power in a year of civil war in 69 CE (Galba and Otho, as well as Vitellius), and ending with the three emperors of the second imperial dynasty of Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian.45
1.24 Although it has recently had relatively little celebrity, this strikingly jowly face, half a metre tall—assumed, on its rediscovery, to be an authentic portrait of the emperor Vitellius—was one of the most replicated ancient images in art between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has now been demoted to (another) ‘unknown Roman’, but there is hardly a major gallery in the West where he can’t be found, lurking in disguise, in paintings, drawings and sculpture (below, pp. 218–26).
These Lives of emperors were among the most popular history books of the European Renaissance. Early humanists owned them in multiple manuscript copies (Petrarch possessed at least three). A printed edition in Latin first appeared in 1470, another thirteen by 1500, and translations into the vernacular came thick and fast. According to one rough reckoning, some 150,000 printed copies, in Latin or translation, were produced across the continent between 1470 and 1700.46 They were hugely influential on art and culture. It was, in fact, the popularity of this series of imperial biographies that gave the Twelve Caesars their canonical place in later history and launched the fashion for their re-creation in those canonical line-ups of modern busts and paintings. Ancient Roman sculptors had often produced groups of portraits (rulers displayed alongside their intended successors or their legitimating ancestors, for example, or sets of famous philosophers), but so far as we know they never produced chronological ‘runs’ of their emperors, from one to twelve.47 That was the Renaissance’s tribute to Suetonius. And it was in his Lives that detailed physical descriptions of the individual rulers were found, and many of the anecdotes about them that provided inspiration for artists over the centuries: Claudius discovered cowering behind a curtain after the murder of Caligula; Nero ‘fiddling while Rome burned’; the heroic suicide of Otho; and many more. Sceptical modern historians may judge such stories as the gossip of the palace corridors, or even outright fantasy, but—thanks to Suetonius and his readers—they have become inextricably part of our view of Roman emperors.
Some later emperors and their families have also captured the popular and artistic imagination. There have been many re-creations of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius (whose often clichéd Thoughts, probably written in the 170s CE, are an improbable twenty-first-century self-help bestseller48), his wife Faustina49 and his son Commodus, the amateur gladiator, as well as of Elagabalus whose grotesque dining habits were almost a match for those of Vitellius; even Alexander Severus and Julia Mamaea still, once in a while, have a small share of the limelight.50 There is also plenty of material elsewhere in the literary tradition of pagan and Christian Rome, besides Suetonius’s Lives, that has occasionally provided a stimulus for modern artists. This includes a set of highly inventive, whimsical biographies of later emperors, now going under the title of the Augustan History, which have given us a variety of extravagant anecdotes. The stories of Elagabalus’s deadly rose petals are only the start. If we believe the Augustan History, the same emperor enjoyed pretentiously colour-coded meals (all blue, all black or whatever, depending on his mood) and invented the whoopee cushion (to be surreptitiously and embarrassingly deflated at dinner under his posh, pompous and, no doubt, anxious guests).51
We shall be taking a look, from time to time, at one or two of these characters. But there is, happily, no need for readers to hold in their heads all the twenty-six or so emperors (not twenty-four) who ruled between Julius Caesar and Alexander Severus, still less the next forty or so emperors who ruled Rome in the less than seventy years until the end of the third century CE; about many of these we know little, and even their exact number depends on how many usurpers and co-rulers you choose to count. It is Suetonius and his Twelve that lie at the heart of this book and at the heart of the modern visual and cultural template for Roman emperors.
Critics and restorers themselves, from the sixteenth century on, debated the role of restoration in completing fragmentary ancient sculpture. How many modern additions and improvements were legitimate? How far was the restorer to be seen as an artist in his own right?34 But, in some portraits, hybridity became an end in itself. In the Capitoline Museums at Rome (standing, as it has done for centuries, in a grand room on the first floor of the Palazzo dei Conservatori) is a full-length figure in marble, the body clad in armour of Roman imperial type, arm outstretched as if to address his legions; the head, by contrast, in the fashion of a sixteenth-century dynast, appears to have come from another age (Fig. 1.21). And indeed it has. This is a statue of the warlord Alessandro Farnese (Il Gran Capitano as he was known, ‘The Great Captain’, or even ‘Big Boss’), erected in 1593, the year after his death. The body was formed out of an ancient Roman statue, said at the time to be of Julius Caesar, its head completely replaced with the distinctive features of Il Gran Capitano.
There may have been practical reasons for this. To our eyes now, the amalgam appears awkward (and very few visitors today stop to admire it). But it meant a very speedy and cheap commission, as the records of the payment to the sculptor make clear. More to the point, though, it was also a powerful visual way of parading a link between the modern hero and the ancient past. The comparison of Alessandro Farnese with Caesar had already been made in a eulogy at his funeral. Here that comparison was monumentalised in marble.35
1.21 Both ancient and modern. The portrait head of Alessandro Farnese by the sculptor Ippolito Buzzi (d. 1634) has been inserted into the life-size body of an ancient statue believed to be that of Julius Caesar. As if to underline the connections between this sixteenth-century warlord and Roman antiquity, his portrait stood (and still stands) in front of a painting of a famous military victory from the myths of early Rome.
There were ancient Roman precedents for this practice. Caesar could hardly have complained at his treatment by those who wanted (literally) to ‘deface’ and ‘reface’ his portrait to honour some sixteenth-century follower. Centuries earlier, his own admirers had done much the same. By the end of the first century CE, on a famous statue of Alexander the Great that stood in the centre of Rome the head of Julius Caesar had been substituted for the original, as if to put the Roman conqueror firmly in the tradition of his Greek predecessor: to place Caesar, if not in Alexander’s shoes, then at least on his neck.36 In both cases—Caesar and Il Gran Capitano—viewers were meant to keep the old and the new simultaneously in their sights: this was art ancient-and-modern.
Imperial Connections: From Napoleon and His Mother to the Last Supper
There is, however, an even more complicated, more subtle and trickier tradition of introducing the imperial faces of ancient Rome into modern portraiture and into modern art more generally. This has sometimes rebounded on the artist or sitter concerned. But modern viewers can lose a lot of the rich layers of meaning if they fail to spot it. A particularly pointed (and notorious) example of this is Antonio Canova’s portrait sculpture of Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Bonaparte (‘Madame Mère’ as she was often known), commissioned by the lady herself in 1804.
Canova did not literally take his chisel to an ancient work of art. But he made much the same point as the sculptor who ‘re-faced’ Julius Caesar to create ‘The Big Boss’, for he based his figure very closely on an ancient statue that now sits, as it has for two centuries, in the middle of the ‘Room of the Emperors’ in the Palazzo Nuovo of the Capitoline Museums in Rome; at the time this was confidently identified as ‘Agrippina’, a woman at the centre of the imperial family in the first century CE (Fig. 1.22).37 Some contemporary critics missed the significance; it was a case, they judged, where the fine boundary between creative imitation and straightforward copying was too fine for comfort, and they accused Canova of plagiarism. Others saw that it raised bigger questions: who exactly was the ‘Agrippina’ depicted in the ancient statue, and so with whom was Madame Mère being linked, and with what message?
Part of the puzzle went back to the fact that there were two prominent Agrippinas in the imperial family of the first century, stereotyped in very different ways. One was the virtuous, if sometimes tediously uncompromising, granddaughter of the emperor Augustus and wife of the popular imperial prince Germanicus, who defended her husband’s memory after his gruesome murder (masterminded, it was claimed, by the jealous emperor Tiberius); she was later exiled, tortured and in 33 CE starved herself, or was starved, to death. The other was her villainous daughter—Agrippina ‘the Younger’ to distinguish her from ‘the Elder’—the wife of the emperor Claudius, whom she reputedly dispatched in 54 CE with a dish of poisoned mushrooms, and the mother, incestuous lover, and eventually murder victim of the emperor Nero. (There is more on this pair in Chapter 7.)
Opinions were sharply divided, usually according to the political sympathies of the critic concerned, on whether it was the paragon or the villain who was the subject of the ancient statue and so the model for Madame Mère. But whichever way it went, the implications were bleak for Napoleon, her son. For what both Agrippinas, the villainous and the virtuous, had in common were their truly monstrous offsprings: the emperor Nero in the case of the Younger, the emperor Caligula in the case of the Elder. Not a few commentators implied that Canova’s target had been Napoleon himself. It was a classic instance of the inseparability of the ancient and the modern (the whole point was not to plagiarise, but to align Madame Mère with a Roman model); and it was another case where such an alignment brought its own controversies and unwelcome political implications. It was the ‘Andrew Jackson dilemma’ writ large.38
In 1818 after the fall of Napoleon, the sixth Duke of Devonshire—an eager collector of contemporary sculpture and a particularly fervent admirer of Canova, with the money to indulge his passions—purchased the statue of Madame Mère in Paris. The subject herself was none too pleased about the sale (‘
It has been in Chatsworth ever since, admired as a masterpiece of Canova, and given extra celebrity from its Napoleonic links (the plinth on which it stands blazons the Latin words, in large capitals, ‘Napoleonis Mater’, ‘Mother of Napoleon’). But whatever the duke may have made of the sculpture’s antique precedents, for most visitors its connections with either Agrippina have long been forgotten, and with those connections a large part of the interest, peculiarity and meaning of the statue has been lost too. A controversial work of art that once exposed some of the awkward questions about imperial character, dynasty and power has settled into a much blander role, as an accomplished portrait combined with a Napoleonic souvenir.
There is a huge amount to gain by putting those classical connections back, both here and elsewhere. It is often, and rightly, said that much of the art produced before the late nineteenth century, in the West at least—I do not want to foist this preoccupation on the rest of the world—must necessarily remain opaque to those who do not have a reasonable knowledge of the Bible and of the classical myths recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a Roman poem, in several volumes, which for centuries held nearly biblical status in artists’ studios).40 That is almost as true for knowledge of the most prominent Roman emperors, their vices and virtues, their power politics and the once well-known anecdotes told about them that were part of the cultural hinterland of artists, patrons and viewers in the past.
1.22 Canova courted danger in modelling his portrait of Napoleon’s mother, Madame Mère, so closely on the life-size statue of ‘Agrippina’ now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. Was it the ‘good Agrippina’ or the monster of the same name? And what, if anything, did that say about the sitter or her son? The irony is that modern art historians are certain that the figure in Rome could not possibly have been a portrait of either Agrippina; on grounds of style and technique alone, it must belong a couple of centuries later (below, p. 137). But partly thanks to Canova, the mistaken identity lingers.
Of course, we should not exaggerate. There have always been plenty of people who did not know or care anything about the ancient classical world, or did not have the time, inclination, resources or cultural capital to engage with these ancient rulers and their stories, any more than with curiosities of Ovid. Even if Classics was never quite so exclusively the privilege of rich white males as is often claimed (the British tradition, for example, of working-class Classics is a rich one41), the classical heritage never is, or was, the be-all and end-all. The fact remains, though, that much of European art speaks to us in more interesting, complicated and surprising ways if we do engage with that heritage, emperors included.
Some of this comes down, as with the sarcophagus of Alexander Severus, to the nuts and bolts of identification and interpretation. As we shall discover, there are some very odd cases of mistaken identity to be uncovered, and (like the gaudy ceramics I touched on) once proud sets of imperial figures, now dispersed across the world and unrecognised, to be tracked down and reassembled. There is Latin, on tapestries and prints, that has been garbled, misunderstood or simply unread for an embarrassingly long time. But we shall also find more unexpected ways in which the story of Roman emperors adds meaning to works of art—even to some which, like the portrait of Madame Mère, appear at first sight to have little or nothing directly to do with Roman imperial history at all.
Another striking case of that is Paolo Veronese’s controversial Last Supper, painted for a religious order in Venice in 1573 and tactically renamed The Feast in the House of Levi, after the Inquisition objected to the inclusion of some elements—such as jesters, drunkards and Germans—that were, at the very least, highly unorthodox for a Catholic Last Supper (Fig. 1.23). On the front plane of the canvas, Veronese gave considerable prominence to a portly steward or, as the painter himself called him, un scalco (a carver). Dressed in a bright striped tunic, the man stands apparently transfixed, as he gazes intently across at Jesus.42 It can hardly be a coincidence that this carver’s facial features are modelled on an ancient Roman portrait then on display in Venice, universally believed at the time to depict the emperor Vitellius, whose assassination was two and a half centuries later to be the subject set for the young French artists competing for the Prix de Rome.
1.23 This vast painting, more than thirteen metres across, was made for the refectory of a Venetian friary. Though Jesus takes the centre place at table, the figure that catches the eye in the foreground is Veronese’s ‘carver’, a look-alike Emperor Vitellius. The same Vitellius also lies behind the features of the man in green, sitting near the column at the top of the stairs on the left.
Known as the ‘Grimani Vitellius’ (after Cardinal Domenico Grimani, who bequeathed it to the city on his death in 1523), it was very popular with artists and draughtsmen, replicated hundreds of times over (Fig. 1.24). It is a plaster cast of this very sculpture that the boy in Fig. 1.10 is carefully drawing, and it also appears to be the basis for one of the smaller figures in the background of Veronese’s Last Supper.43 But those who knew something of the reputation of this walk-on part in imperial history could not have failed to spot some meaningful irony here, in addition to a convenient artistic model. For in this painting, a look-alike Vitellius, reputedly one of the most cruelly immoral of all Roman rulers, albeit on the throne for only a few months, has been shown enthralled by the sight of Jesus. But more than that, an emperor whose gluttony was said to have been a match for any of the notorious over-eaters of Roman history (the word ‘Vitellian’ until recently being a synonym for ‘gastronomically lavish’), has been converted into a carver, or steward. The tables, in other words, have been turned from consumer to server.
Those who were better informed about Vitellius’s family might even have spotted a further resonance with the Christian story. For it was none other than the father of this Vitellius—one Lucius Vitellius—who as Roman governor of Syria became the nemesis of Pontius Pilate, dismissing him from his post in Judaea in 36 CE, a few years after the events depicted in the painting.44 It is as if this anachronistic imperial likeness (the emperor was actually still in his teens at the time of the Last Supper) was incorporated into the biblical scene to act as a wry internal commentary on Veronese’s own work and pointing to further depths in its characters and narrative. It is a pity to miss them.
Suetonius and His Twelve Caesars
Veronese and his contemporaries mostly knew their Vitellius, directly or indirectly, through the ancient Life of him that was written in the second century CE by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. It was here they would have found many of the lurid tales of his gluttony and immorality (a partiality to flamingo tongues and pheasant brains, for example, as well as to watching executions). Suetonius had experienced the imperial court from the inside, serving as librarian and general secretary to the emperor Hadrian, before falling from favour in a scandal that was said to have involved Hadrian’s wife, Sabina. The Life of Vitellius was just one of a series of biographies of the first Twelve Caesars, in which the biographer charted the story of the first century and a half of one-man rule at Rome: starting with the ‘dictatorship’ and then assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, then the Lives of the five emperors of the first imperial dynasty (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero), followed by those of the three short-lived contenders for power in a year of civil war in 69 CE (Galba and Otho, as well as Vitellius), and ending with the three emperors of the second imperial dynasty of Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian.45
1.24 Although it has recently had relatively little celebrity, this strikingly jowly face, half a metre tall—assumed, on its rediscovery, to be an authentic portrait of the emperor Vitellius—was one of the most replicated ancient images in art between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has now been demoted to (another) ‘unknown Roman’, but there is hardly a major gallery in the West where he can’t be found, lurking in disguise, in paintings, drawings and sculpture (below, pp. 218–26).
These Lives of emperors were among the most popular history books of the European Renaissance. Early humanists owned them in multiple manuscript copies (Petrarch possessed at least three). A printed edition in Latin first appeared in 1470, another thirteen by 1500, and translations into the vernacular came thick and fast. According to one rough reckoning, some 150,000 printed copies, in Latin or translation, were produced across the continent between 1470 and 1700.46 They were hugely influential on art and culture. It was, in fact, the popularity of this series of imperial biographies that gave the Twelve Caesars their canonical place in later history and launched the fashion for their re-creation in those canonical line-ups of modern busts and paintings. Ancient Roman sculptors had often produced groups of portraits (rulers displayed alongside their intended successors or their legitimating ancestors, for example, or sets of famous philosophers), but so far as we know they never produced chronological ‘runs’ of their emperors, from one to twelve.47 That was the Renaissance’s tribute to Suetonius. And it was in his Lives that detailed physical descriptions of the individual rulers were found, and many of the anecdotes about them that provided inspiration for artists over the centuries: Claudius discovered cowering behind a curtain after the murder of Caligula; Nero ‘fiddling while Rome burned’; the heroic suicide of Otho; and many more. Sceptical modern historians may judge such stories as the gossip of the palace corridors, or even outright fantasy, but—thanks to Suetonius and his readers—they have become inextricably part of our view of Roman emperors.
Some later emperors and their families have also captured the popular and artistic imagination. There have been many re-creations of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius (whose often clichéd Thoughts, probably written in the 170s CE, are an improbable twenty-first-century self-help bestseller48), his wife Faustina49 and his son Commodus, the amateur gladiator, as well as of Elagabalus whose grotesque dining habits were almost a match for those of Vitellius; even Alexander Severus and Julia Mamaea still, once in a while, have a small share of the limelight.50 There is also plenty of material elsewhere in the literary tradition of pagan and Christian Rome, besides Suetonius’s Lives, that has occasionally provided a stimulus for modern artists. This includes a set of highly inventive, whimsical biographies of later emperors, now going under the title of the Augustan History, which have given us a variety of extravagant anecdotes. The stories of Elagabalus’s deadly rose petals are only the start. If we believe the Augustan History, the same emperor enjoyed pretentiously colour-coded meals (all blue, all black or whatever, depending on his mood) and invented the whoopee cushion (to be surreptitiously and embarrassingly deflated at dinner under his posh, pompous and, no doubt, anxious guests).51
We shall be taking a look, from time to time, at one or two of these characters. But there is, happily, no need for readers to hold in their heads all the twenty-six or so emperors (not twenty-four) who ruled between Julius Caesar and Alexander Severus, still less the next forty or so emperors who ruled Rome in the less than seventy years until the end of the third century CE; about many of these we know little, and even their exact number depends on how many usurpers and co-rulers you choose to count. It is Suetonius and his Twelve that lie at the heart of this book and at the heart of the modern visual and cultural template for Roman emperors.
