Twelve Caesars, page 7
2.6 Acquired by the British Museum in 1818 as an ‘unknown Roman’, from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, this life-size bust was the most famous, and most reproduced image of Caesar. It is now generally thought to be an eighteenth-century fake or pastiche.
It is now hard to take this kind of prose seriously. The special pleading (‘it wasn’t done from life, but it is even better than if it were’) grates, and the hyperbole seems out of all proportion to the portrait itself, especially for those of us who are not so convinced of Caesar’s unmitigated ‘greatness’. But it is, nevertheless, clear what lies behind it. The priority of these writers was to claim a face-to-face encounter with the human being captured in the marble—even if, in practice, they were doing little more than finding an appropriate image onto which they could project their various assumptions about ‘Caesar the man’, from visionary power through a hint of unscrupulousness to an uncannily female side. There is also a hint, as Rice Holmes almost admits, that the passion is partly compensating for the lack of a really hard argument behind the identification of this head with Caesar. And that indeed was to become the problem. For what if the British Museum’s bust was not really Caesar? Or was not even ancient Roman?
Doubts began to show very soon after 1846, when the statue was given the name of Caesar. A museum handbook published in 1861 took care to rebut a claim that this was not Caesar at all, but one of his contemporaries: ‘There have not been wanting critics who have strenuously maintained that it is really a pourtrait
This Caesar has never been reinstated as a genuine ancient piece, and it has since passed from the care and control of the Museum’s Greek and Roman Department to the British and Medieval Department and back again, as if no one could quite decide where the awkwardly illegitimate specimen belonged (one thing is for certain: it is neither British nor medieval). It was only in 1961, however, that a detailed technical case was made against it: by Bernard Ashmole, who had been the Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum between 1939 and 1956. Ashmole emphasised the suspiciously brown colour of the whole piece. Had tobacco juice been applied to it, he wondered, as part of the forger’s armoury for producing an ‘antique’ patina? But the real give-away was the pitted texture of the skin. Its supporters had put this down to the (ancient) head having been cleaned with acid (which was certainly part of the eighteenth-century repertoire of ‘treatments’), though Furtwängler had already suggested it was ‘fabricated corrosion’. Ashmole argued more precisely that the cause was physical battering—‘distressing’ is the technical term—carried out with the fraudulent intention to make it appear old. Indeed, he pointed out, you could see patches of smooth marble remaining, where the distressing had stopped a little short of the hairline. This appeared to be the conclusive proof. The sculpture is no longer on show at all, though it does occasionally emerge from its basement exile to star in exhibitions of notorious fakes.34
At almost exactly the same moment, however, there was another portrait waiting in the wings to take this Caesar’s place. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Lucien Bonaparte—archaeologist, collector, sometime revolutionary and younger (partly estranged) brother of Napoleon—discovered a marble head in excavations near his house just south of Rome, on the site of the ancient town of Tusculum. It did not particularly stand out among the finds and, like the British Museum head, it was identified at first not as a Caesar but as a generic ‘old man’ or ‘old philosopher’. After Bonaparte hit hard times both politically and economically, it ended up in the hands of new owners in a castle at Aglié outside Turin, where it remained anonymously for a hundred years or so.35 It was only in 1940 (an auspicious moment for discovering Caesars in Italy, given Mussolini’s enthusiasm) that an Italian archaeologist, Maurizio Borda, argued that it was in fact Julius Caesar (Fig. 2.7).
This was on the usual grounds of the similarities to the coin portraits of 44 BCE, but Borda went further. Not only did he conclude that the similarities were so close that the portrait must have been made during Caesar’s lifetime, but he also felt able to use the sculpture to diagnose two deformations of the skull from which Caesar had obviously suffered. The slightly odd shape of the head was not caused by incompetence, or idiosyncrasy, on the part of the artist. It was an accurate reflection of two congenital cranial pathologies, clinocefalia (a slight depression at the top of the head) and plagiocefalia (a flattening on one side of the skull). This portrait has rivalled the British Museum Caesar in the hyperbole it has prompted. ‘The almost imperceptible movement of the slightly lifted head, and the momentary contraction of the forehead and the mouth, tell of a watchful and superior presence,’ wrote one art historian only recently, praising its ‘psychological realism’. ‘In the look of the eyes, slightly converging, one has the impression of discerning a certain aristocratic reserve or irony.’36 But, even more than its British Museum rival, the Tusculum head has been considered to be so close to life that it could support a clinical diagnosis: this is not just looking Caesar in the eye, it is taking his case notes.
2.7 The favourite Julius Caesar of the mid-twentieth century. Excavated in the early nineteenth century at the site of Tusculum in Italy, it was at first identified as an anonymous ‘old man’, but re-identified in 1940 as the authentic, life-size, face of Caesar. Beyond the lines on the neck, here the shape of the skull has been taken to indicate a cranial deformity (from which Caesar may, or may not, have suffered).
Here too views have begun to change. The Caesar from Tusculum still has its enthusiasts, and in 2018 it was used—with much international media attention—to produce a full-scale, ‘scientific’ reconstruction of the authentic face of the dictator.37 But even among its supporters, many no longer insist that it is a portrait taken from life (let alone the only such to have survived); still less that it is another of those holy grails of Roman portrait studies, an image made from the man’s death mask.38 They concede that it is much more likely a copy or version of an earlier sculpture in bronze that has been lost, and they group it together with four other ancient, though later, ‘Caesars’ (including the recent discovery at Pantelleria), in which there are arguably traces of similar oddities of the skull—as if they were all based on that same bronze original.39 Far from the high-flown praise for its artistic quality with which Borda had greeted the head, there are also those who now rate it as a rather rough, or at least very badly corroded, piece of work (‘a mediocre copy’). It may well be only a matter of time before it is relegated back to the status of ‘unknown old man’. Its return to anonymity will certainly be eased, or hastened, by the fact that the Caesar from the Rhône is already there to take its place, and being greeted with all the same acclamations. Museum visitors confronting it for the first time (and using social media as eighteenth-century travellers used their journals) have reported themselves ‘transfixed by the sheer presence emanating from it’, unable to tear themselves away from the sight of the great man. This is not so very far from John Buchan and friends.40
2.8 Behind the ear of the British Museum Caesar, evidence of unfinished work—in a series of drill holes, made in the process of separating the ear from the head, but never intended to remain in the final, finished piece.
But these certainties are always shifting and more surprises lie in store. There is even an outside chance that the British Museum Caesar may one day be rehabilitated as authentically ancient (even if not necessarily a Caesar, or not necessarily taken from life). For, almost unnoticed, behind both ears, on one side more clearly than the other, runs a line of drill holes (Fig. 2.8). These are signs of unfinished work. Following a pattern found on genuinely ancient sculptures, the sculptor has started the delicate business of freeing the ear from the head (delicate, because it is very easy to break the ear off as you do it). He has speeded up the process by drilling these holes, but he has not done the final work with the chisel to make a clean gap. How is that to be explained? Possibly this is an unfinished fake (late eighteenth-century sculptors could well have been using the same techniques as their ancient forebears and it is not only genuine articles that might be left incomplete). Possibly it is a double bluff by some modern craftsman, hoping to add an aura of authenticity to the work, through that sense of a slight flaw. But those who sell fakes do not usually trade in imperfection. Whatever the other signs of modernity, those little holes may eventually re-open the question of exactly where on the spectrum between ancient and modern this sculpture lies. Whether it will ever re-emerge from its basement exile, who knows?41
The ‘Look’ of Caesar
The story of the ancient face of Caesar can seem a frustrating series of about-turns, dead ends, identifications and re-identifications. For decades one particular portrait is treated as the most accurate and authentic image of the dictator; then, for reasons that are not obviously stronger than those that gave it the fame in the first place, it is sidelined as a fake, as not Caesar anyway or simply as a later second-rate hack copy of some original masterpiece, now lost to us entirely. It is as if, over the last couple of hundred years (and the pattern surely goes back earlier), every generation or so has homed in on its favourite Caesar, which holds sway for a while, offering the modern world that precious opportunity to look Caesar directly in the eye and to see through the marble image to the personality—even the clinical pathology—of the man behind it. In due course this is toppled by some new discovery, or rediscovery, and fades back into relative obscurity; while other members of the supporting cast, such as the ‘Green Caesar’ or Mussolini’s version, slip in and out of the limelight. For those relegated, the distinction they retain (rather like Jesse Elliott’s misidentified sarcophagi) is that they were once thought to be Caesar.
Yet despite these seemingly endless debates and disagreements, Julius Caesar is one of the most easily recognisable of all Roman rulers in the art of the modern world, in painting, sculpture and ceramics, cartoons and films, as well as in fakes and forgeries. Among any collection of Renaissance busts of the Twelve Caesars, he usually stands out as the slightly gaunt one with the aquiline features, though not necessarily the scraggy neck and Adam’s apple. That is how he is depicted too in almost every painting or drawing, from Mantegna’s slightly sinister figure in his triumphal chariot (Fig. 6.7), through Camuccini’s dying dictator (Fig. 2.4e) to the cartoon version of Astérix, complete with wreath and disconcertingly staring eyes (Fig. 1.18i). And it is exactly those features that have always made it tempting to imagine that Desiderio’s delicate marble sculpture, one of the high points of fifteenth-century craftsmanship, was intended as an image of Caesar, despite—as in all its ancient predecessors—the complete absence of a name (Fig. 2.4f).42 The ‘look’ of Caesar (and I choose my words carefully) is easy to spot.
That ‘look’ is, of course, a complicated, multi-layered and self-reinforcing stereotype, and one of the best examples of those entanglements between ancient and modern that I discussed in Chapter 1. Part of it certainly derives from the memorable heads on the coins of 44 BCE, part from full-sized sculptures believed to be ancient representations of Caesar (some of which were almost certainly not) and part from the words of Suetonius. But artists have also responded to the work of their modern peers and predecessors, who in the process of re-creating the image of Caesar—in painting, sculpture or even on the stage—helped to establish a touchstone by which his future representations would be judged.43
It is impossible to know how far this composite resembles the dictator’s appearance in flesh and blood. Most people would, I think, claim some overlap between them; but however large or small the overlap was, that set of features successfully signals ‘Caesar’ to us. My guess is that they would roughly have signalled ‘Caesar’ to Roman viewers too; it would not have been difficult for many of them to work out who was standing in Mantegna’s triumphal chariot, or ticking off the troublesome Gauls in the comic strip.
The Forward Plan
The portraits of none of Julius Caesar’s successors have attracted quite such lavish encomia and gushing hyperbole, or been so fiercely debated. But Augustus, Caligula, Nero and Vespasian have all recently starred in their own exhibitions, and over the last couple of hundred years there have been other ‘mais c’est César’ moments as images of later emperors came spectacularly to light; or so it was claimed. One of the most recent, and most unconvincing, examples is a headless, and partly body-less, seated marble figure, seized from ‘tomb raiders’ by the Italian police in 2011, and almost instantly hyped as the emperor Caligula—with plenty of juicy allusions to his madness, debauchery and promiscuity thrown in.44 Without a face to go on, unless a battered, more or less featureless, head discovered not far away actually belonged to the piece, the identification relied heavily on the statue’s elaborate sandal, which was taken to be one of the military boots or caligae the emperor wore as a toddler and was the source of the nickname ‘Caligula’ by which he is now usually known. Few people chose to ask why on earth, in this once rather grand sculpture, there should have been a visual reference to the childish nickname (‘Bootikins’ gets the flavour) that the emperor, officially known as ‘Gaius’, is said to have loathed. Such is our desire to rediscover the famous, and infamous, emperors.
By and large these later rulers have been tracked down by the methods very like those used in the hunt for Caesar. The same subjective procedure of compare and contrast—with Suetonius’s description or the tiny coin portraits—underlies most identifications and has long been so taken for granted that in the eighteenth century one trick of the ciceroni, or tour guides, was to carry round a pocketful of ancient coins to help their clients give a name to the statues they were looking at.45 There are similar arguments with Caesar’s successors too about how to distinguish an emperor made by a modern sculptor from one produced in the Roman world itself; and there are any number of hopeless examples of wishful thinking, changing identities and deeply disputed cases. A pair of statues found in a building off the Forum in Pompeii has kept archaeologists busy for decades, trying to decide (on no firm evidence at all) whether they are some lofty imperial couple or two ambitious local dignitaries aping the imperial style.46
That said, there are some significant differences between images of Caesar and those of later emperors. Their identification has not always proved quite so difficult. A few sculptures have actually been found with names attached, and others in contexts, such as the dynastic group at Pantelleria, that drastically narrow down the options of who is who;47 and the far greater number and variety of surviving coin portraits offer a wider basis for comparison than anything before. There are also many more examples to work with overall. His successors often went far beyond Caesar in the mass dissemination of portraits. The guess that there were originally between twenty-five thousand and fifty thousand portraits of Augustus to be found across the Roman world may be too generous. But one reliable index of quantity comes from inscribed pedestals. Just over twenty survive that once held an image of Caesar; there are over two hundred that held an image of Augustus, at least a hundred and forty of them put up during his life (a long one, to be sure, but the underlying point remains).48
2.9 The ‘Meroe head’ of Augustus, so-called after the Kushite city of Meroe in modern Sudan where it was found. Complete with its original inlaid eyes, it almost certainly once belonged to an over-life-size bronze statue of the emperor, erected by the Romans in Egypt, raided by the Kushites and taken back as a trophy to Meroe. In the early twentieth century, it was excavated by British archaeologists and taken to the UK. The calm classical features of the portrait should not obscure the complicated stories of empire and violence that now lie behind it.
There are clear signs that, after Caesar, ‘getting the imperial image out’ became a highly centralised operation. Even when they are discovered hundreds or thousands of miles apart, some of the surviving imperial portraits are very closely similar to each other, right down to (or especially in) such tiny details as the precise arrangement of the locks of the hair (Figs 2.9 and 2.10b). For most modern art historians, the only way to explain the combination of such wide distribution and sometimes virtually identical portraits has been to imagine that models of the imperial face, probably in clay, wax or plaster, were sent out from the administration in Rome to the different parts of the empire, to be imitated by local artists and craftsmen, often in local stone. Some authorised prototype ensured that when Roman subjects, wherever they were, looked up at the statues in their distant hometowns, they all saw the same emperor.
