Twelve Caesars, page 5
Imperial Perspectives
A classical eye on modern art opens up many different perspectives. Like any focus, it may sometimes obscure as well as illuminate. There will almost inevitably be some losses in gathering together, as I do, images of Roman emperors and thinking about them across the work of different artists, different media, different times and places. Particular chronological developments, various aspects of painterly or sculptural technique, important local and topical references or the role of imperial images within an artist’s whole output may in this way be relegated to the background, their importance glossed over. Titian’s Caesars, after all, have links with his biblical scenes and Bacchanals, as well as with images of emperors by other artists, ancient and modern. But there are definite gains too in daring to take this specifically classical view, and in focussing on emperors in particular.
For a start, it corrects a misleading imbalance in how we look at the story of ancient art in the European Renaissance and later. Of course, there has been much excellent specialist work on many of the ancient imperial images that I shall be exploring; but pride of place has almost always gone to the modern reception of one-off celebrity statues, such as the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere, rather than to the reception of these multiple replications of the faces of imperial power. It is not only weary museum- or gallery-visitors that tend to pass by emperors’ heads without much of a second glance. Some of the most influential recent studies of the modern rediscovery and reappropriation of classical art have given them almost as scant attention, even though they occupy such a large part of the visual landscape and have exercised the imagination of artists (and the brains of scholars) for centuries.52 It has proved all too easy, for example, to forget that the foot and the hand which are the centre of the most famous visual reflection in the eighteenth century on the nature of the artist’s relationship with the past are the foot and hand of a Roman emperor—remnants in the Capitoline Museums of a colossal statue of the fourth-century Constantine (Fig. 1.25).53 My aim is to give these emperors, whether faces or fragments, their part in the story again.
It is an international—and a highly mobile—part, which is not best explored within geographical boundaries or according to narrow political lines. Politics can be important, as we have seen. But those who counted themselves Republicans did not all share Andrew Jackson’s principled implacable hostility to the material souvenirs of imperial power; and even if modern European autocrats in particular may have exploited the face of Roman emperors, they were not the only ones to do so. Across regimes of all kinds, republics, monarchies and petty fiefdoms, through war zones, looting and diplomatic negotiations, imperial images, ancient and modern, have always been on the move: bought and sold, stolen, bartered and given away, they have been transported across the continent of Europe and beyond. A block of marble from Greece might be fashioned as an imperial head in Rome, before ending up, 1500 years later as a diplomatic gift or bribe, elegantly refashioned, in a princely palace in modern Spain. One exquisite set of twelve sixteenth-century silver emperors (that we shall meet again in Chapter 4) was probably made in the Low Countries, sold on to the Aldobrandini family in Italy, then somehow made its way back north to England and France, before being dispersed in the nineteenth century and ending up across half the globe, from Lisbon to Los Angeles.
1.25 Among the most powerful, and puzzling, images to evoke the relationship between the modern artist and the classical past is Johann Heinrich Fuseli’s small chalk drawing (less than half a metre tall), The Artist’s Despair before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins (1778–80). Does the artist despair because he cannot live up to the example of antiquity? Or because the art of the ancient world is so very ruined? The hand and the foot by which the artist sits come from a colossal ancient statue of Constantine (emperor 306–37).
No doubt these works of art were viewed and valued differently as they moved around (and that will be one of my concerns), but they certainly did not belong to any one place. Nor did many of the sculptured images belong to any one time either. The restorations, the imitations, the hybridity and the uncertain boundaries between modern and ancient undermine any straightforwardly chronological treatment. Part of their pleasure is that, as ‘works in progress’, they refuse to be pinned down to a single date. They are, to adopt a favourite term of some modern historians of the Renaissance, anachronic: they resist and transcend linear chronology.54
There are also far too many of them for a single book, which spans over two thousand years, from the anonymous artists who produced the ancient marble portraits of Julius Caesar to Salvador Dalí, Anselm Kiefer and Alison Wilding in the last half-century. Inevitably even some of my own favourite art and artists find only a walk-on part: Rubens has tended to lose out to Titian, Josiah Wedgwood to the tapestry makers of Flanders. Images in opera, theatre, television and film too have had to remain in the background. Early film was in large part constructed out of the representation of scenes from the Roman world, including its characterful rulers; but that is another story.55 This is a book largely about non-moving images, concentrating on a selection of the most revealing and surprising emperors (and ‘emperors’) produced, or reproduced, since the fifteenth century. Its aim is to show just how eye-opening it can be to rediscover the visual language of Roman rulers, just how much fun to follow their travels across nations and continents, sometimes through a fog of misunderstanding, misidentification and mistranslation, and just how intriguing to recreate from scattered traces some of the most influential modern images of Roman emperors that we have already lost. But even the most ordinary looking imperial bust, one of those forgotten wallflowers in the gallery, sometimes has an eventful and important life history.
In the back of my mind will be some of the big questions about the presentation of modern political power, dynasty and monarchy that are often shelved—and that a classical perspective can sharpen. There have been important and subtle studies over the last few decades of how the image of a king is constructed, of the ‘self-fashioning’ of the elite, or of the use of ritual—and the invention of tradition—in creating a monarch or underpinning monarchy.56 But the idea that modern power should be cast in the image of imperial Roman power, or that Roman emperors provided a fitting backdrop for the European aristocracy centuries later, has often seemed self-evident, almost too banal to be investigated or unpicked.
I shall be showing that it is not self-evident at all, and asking directly what these modern images of emperors were for. What did they mean to those who commissioned, bought or looked at them? Why did so many people in the West choose to recreate a series of emperors most of whom had such a strong reputation (even if an unreliable one) for immorality, cruelty, excess and misrule? Only in the case of one of Suetonius’s Twelve (that is, Vespasian) were there no rumours at all of death by assassination. Why then were they celebrated on the palace walls of modern dynasts? And why did they occasionally decorate the council chambers of republics? To put it another way, leaving aside Andrew Jackson’s own particular scruples about ‘Caesarism’, why would anyone want to be laid to rest in a hand-me-down coffin claimed once to have held the remains of an assassinated Roman emperor?
But first, let’s go back two thousand years to the imperial images from the ancient world itself that underlie so many of the later copies, versions, imitations and transformations. We cannot properly understand those modern representations unless we reflect a little more on how the Roman emperors who inspired them were portrayed in the ancient world itself—with all the puzzles, debates and controversies that brings. Here too there are some basic questions that often get passed over, and taking a modern perspective may indeed throw light back onto the ancient images themselves. How, out of the many thousands of Roman portraits that survive, can we spot—or name—an emperor? If a Renaissance artist wanted to find an ancient model for his re-creation of an ancient ruler, where did he go? Except for the tiny images in coins, there is hardly a single surviving ancient imperial portrait that comes with a reliable name attached, so how did later sculptors and painters know which was which?
No such images have been more controversial, or instructive, than those of Julius Caesar, and none have exposed so clearly the disconcerting gap between an imperial face and an imperial name. They stand at the very beginning of the tradition of Roman imperial portraiture and also at the very heart of the modern engagement with the Twelve Caesars. So, it is from these that we start.
II
WHO’S WHO IN THE TWELVE CAESARS
‘It’s Caesar!’
In October 2007, French archaeologists exploring the bed of the river Rhône at Arles dragged a marble head out of the water (Fig. 2.1). It was apparently still dripping when the director of the team shouted, ‘Putain, mais c’est César’ (‘Fuck, it’s Caesar’ probably captures his surprise better than any other, more polite, translation). Since then, this head has been the subject of dozens of newspaper articles and at least two television documentaries, it has been the star of an exhibition shown in Arles and at the Louvre, and in 2014 it even appeared on French postage stamps.1
Part of this attention has been sparked by one very special claim, that the head is not simply a portrait of Julius Caesar, but is one of the holy grails in the study of Roman portraiture: an image of Caesar sculpted in his lifetime by an artist who had studied him face to face. If so, it would be the only certain example to survive (though other candidates have over the years been proposed). The assumption is that the bust was originally set up in some prominent place in the Roman city of Arles, redeveloped by Caesar in 46 BCE as a settlement for his veteran soldiers; and that, after Caesar’s assassination in 44, fearing that their Caesarian connections might prove (to say the least) awkward, the locals decided to dispose of this potentially hot property in the river, where it lay for over two thousand years.
Modern archaeologists and art historians are still divided on the identity and significance of the find. Sceptics emphasise how different overall the head from the Rhône appears to be from Caesar’s portrait on contemporary coins—and different too from other, admittedly posthumous, portraits commonly identified as him. The supporters of the identification, by contrast, stress the specific points of similarity between this head and some individual features on the coin portraits, notably the lines in the neck and the prominent Adam’s apple (Fig. 2.3). A few come close to claiming that the fact that it does not in general look much like the other Caesars could actually be confirmation that it is an authentic and unique image carved from life, and not a run-of-the-mill replica piece—an ingenious ‘have it both ways’ style of argument (it’s Caesar whether it looks like him or not) that doesn’t inspire confidence.2
2.1 The ‘Arles Caesar’, a portrait bust dragged out of the river Rhône to a huge fanfare in 2007. Whether it is really an image of Julius Caesar himself is a matter of debate, but its supporters point to the prominent lines on the neck, one of Caesar’s characteristic features.
2.2 The Great [i.e., ‘big’] Cameo of France, roughly thirty by twenty-five centimetres, captures one view of Roman hierarchy: the emperor Augustus, at the top, looks down from his afterlife in heaven; in the centre, the emperor Tiberius holds court, next to his mother Livia; at the bottom huddle the conquered barbarians. Made around 50 CE, and on display in France since the Middle Ages (hence its title), it is certainly not a biblical scene as once thought. But who exactly all the minor members of the imperial family are remains a puzzle.
2.3 This coin (a silver denarius) minted in 44 BCE shortly before Caesar’s assassination has often been taken as the key to his appearance, with a prominent Adam’s apple, wrinkly neck and a wreath possibly carefully placed to cover up a bald patch. Caesar’s name and title run around the coin edge: ‘Caesar Dict[ator] Quart[o]’ (dictator for the fourth time). Behind his head is a symbol of one of his priesthoods.
Despite the scepticism (and I am one of the sceptics), it seems as if this is set to be the face of Julius Caesar for the twenty-first century—taking its place as the most recent in a series of favoured portraits of him that have held sway for a time in the popular and scholarly imagination, before being pushed aside by a rival contender. But, whatever the credentials of the piece, it opens up some big questions that will guide this chapter. What was the purpose, and the politics, of portraiture in the Roman world itself? How did its role change through the reign of Caesar and his successors? How (and how reliably) have ancient portraits of these rulers been identified, when almost none are named or carry any other identifying mark? Before we can start exploring modern re-creations of these imperial rulers, we need to consider how the original Roman versions of them have been pinned down, from the Caesar of the Rhône through the godlike serene images of the emperor Augustus to some strange outliers—such as the famous Grimani head of ‘Vitellius’ (Fig. 1.24) which, as we shall discover at the end of this chapter, was not only a favourite model for modern artists but has had a starring role in scientific debates, from the sixteenth century on, about the relationship of the shape of the skull to human character.
It turns out that we are not necessarily any better now at identifying emperors in ancient portraits than our predecessors were hundreds of years ago. True, a few very old errors, often going back to the Middle Ages, have been overturned, some spurious emperors have been dethroned, and those masquerading under entirely different identities have been conclusively revealed as rulers of the Roman world. The idea that the famous bronze statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius on horseback on the Capitoline hill in Rome actually represented a humble local strongman who had saved the city from an invading king has long been written off as a piece of garbled medieval folklore, or more generously as an ingenious reappropriation of the ancient past (Fig. 1.11).3 And the traditional notion that one particularly splendid ancient Roman cameo depicted the biblical scene of the triumph of Joseph at the court of the pharaoh was demolished by a learned friend of Peter Paul Rubens, who around 1620 correctly pointed out that it was instead a family group of the emperor Tiberius, complete with Augustus looking down from heaven and some benighted barbarians underneath (Fig. 2.2). The old reading was a tremendous tribute to the Christian talent for finding a religious message in the most unlikely places, and it may well help to explain why the cameo was preserved. It was also flagrantly wrong.4
But such cases are rare. Historians in the twenty-first century are still spotting emperors by much the same methods as those in the fifteenth or sixteenth, we are still debating the pros and cons of many of the same objects and we can on occasion be more gullible than the shrewd scholars of the past. In the eighteenth century, J. J. Winckelmann reported that Cardinal Albani, famous collector and connoisseur, was doubtful that any genuine heads of Julius Caesar had survived. Whatever exactly he meant by ‘genuine’, I suspect that Albani would have had his doubts about the specimen from the Rhône.5
Julius Caesar and His Statues
In Roman history, Julius Caesar stood on the boundary between the free Republic (that power-sharing regime so beloved of anti-monarchists from the Founding Fathers to the French revolutionaries) and the autocratic rule of the emperors. He marked the end of one political system and the beginning of another. Although its rights and wrongs have been debated ever since, his story in outline was simple. After a fairly conventional early career, winning election to a regular series of political, military and priestly offices, by the middle of the first century BCE, Caesar stood out above most of his political peers. He had been a massively successful conqueror even by Roman standards (so brutal that some of his own countrymen occasionally muttered about war crimes). And he had won enormous support from the ordinary people of Rome, thanks largely to a number of high-profile popular measures, such as land distribution and free grain rations, which he had either initiated or supported. By 49 BCE, he was unwilling any longer to toe the line within conventional politics, and in a civil war against the traditionalists (or ‘the uncompromising reactionaries’, depending on your point of view), he fought his way to what was in effect one-man rule. Within a few years he was made ‘dictator for life’, turning an old Roman emergency-powers office of dictator into dictatorship in the modern sense. His assassination was carried out under the slogan of ‘Liberty’, the watchword of the old republican regime. But if his assassins really wanted to undo the autocratic turn at Rome, they failed. Within less than fifteen years, after another civil war, Caesar’s great nephew Octavian (later to take the name ‘Augustus’) had established himself on the throne, and devised a form of autocracy that would last for the rest of Roman time.6
By starting his series of imperial biographies with Julius Caesar, Suetonius turned him into the first emperor of Rome. Few historians in recent years have followed this line. Although Caesar inevitably faces two ways, we now tend to see him more as the last chapter of the Republic, as the death blow to a political system that had been tottering for decades, unable to accommodate the ambition, wealth and power of a new generation of leaders (Caesar was not the only one moving in this direction). Being dictator was a long way from being emperor (or from being princeps, which is the closest Latin equivalent of that term). But Suetonius’s alternative view does alert us to the ways in which Caesar left his stamp on the system of one-man rule that was to follow him.7 Most obviously, he gave his personal name to all his successors. Every Roman emperor ever after took ‘Caesar’—which up to then had been no more than what we would call an ordinary surname—as part of his official title. And that remained the case right down to the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire into the nineteenth century (whether as ‘Caesar’ or ‘Kaiser’) or to other look-alikes, such as the ‘Czars’. When we talk about the Twelve Caesars, that is exactly what they were.
