Twelve Caesars, page 8
2.10
(a) The head of Augustus from his statue at the villa of Livia at Prima Porta near Rome
(b) Diagram of the hair locks on an imperial portrait (based on the Prima Porta head, 2.10a)
(c) Head usually identified as Tiberius, Augustus’s successor
(d) Caligula depicted closely on the model of his predecessor Tiberius
(e) Head variously identified as Augustus, Caligula and two chosen heirs of Augustus, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, who died young
(f) Head variously identified as Augustus, Caligula, Gaius Caesar and Nero (and possibly re-cut to give it different identities)
There is actually not a shred of evidence for these prototypes, no trace in the Roman record of those who might have designed, made or dispatched them and no clue to the identity of the artists who used them to produce the finished sculptures. And they cannot possibly account for the wide variety of independent images, empire wide, that were intended to represent the emperor. Not everything was ‘top down’, or ‘centre out’. The moulds for imperial biscuits were surely not based directly on any template dispatched from Rome, nor were the splendid carvings of the emperor in the guise of an Egyptian pharaoh, nor all those rough-and-ready paintings that Fronto reported seeing (Fig. 2.11). Nonetheless, the logic that some such regulated process of copying lies behind some of the similarities in some sculptures is almost inescapable, and has obvious consequences for how imperial faces are recognised.
2.11 On the walls of the Egyptian temple at Dendur, built c. 15 BCE, Augustus several times appears in the guise of a pharaoh. Here, on the right, in an image that was once brightly painted, he offers wine to two Egyptian deities. In the cartouches (oval frames) next to his head he is named in hieroglyphs as ‘Autokrator’ (emperor) and ‘Caesar’—making this a much firmer identification than almost any of his Greco-Roman style portraits.
Over the last hundred years or so this has provided not so much a new method for identifying the portraits of emperors, but a new weapon in the traditional armoury of comparison. Many faces have been pinned down on the basis of tiny diagnostic details, which suggest that they derived from the same centrally produced model. At its most extreme, there can be something even more absurd about all this than the fuss over Caesar’s neck and his Adam’s apple: everything can rest on the tell-tale pincer formation of the curls above the statue’s right eye, for example, and almost nothing on what the sculpture actually looks like overall. But it means that, while barely a single head of Julius Caesar has gone unchallenged, combining the ‘absolutely certain’ identifications with the ‘very probable’, there are now a total of around two hundred surviving portraits of Augustus (who leads the count), and even twenty for young Alexander Severus.49
2.12 The down-to-earth style and decidedly middle-aged appearance of this head of Vespasian marks a—no doubt intentional—contrast with the youthful perfection of images of the previous, Julio-Claudian, dynasty.
This does not mean that all the Roman rulers following Caesar have an equally distinctive ‘look’ in ancient or modern art: far from it. Among Suetonius’s Twelve, Nero—with his characteristic double chin and sometimes the beginnings of a stubbly beard—regularly stands out in line-ups of marble busts almost as clearly as Julius Caesar; likewise, it is not hard to spot the almost impossibly perfect and youthful Augustus or the recognisably middle-aged, down-to-earth Vespasian (Fig. 2.12). But for modern viewers there are some frustrating mismatches between the emperors who are most memorably described in literature—Caligula, for example—and their rather bland representations in marble. Leaving aside the details of the hairstyle, some of Caesar’s immediate successors (especially if you include the penumbra of heirs and princes) really do look confusingly indistinguishable. To understand this, we must turn to other innovations at this period and to the politics behind them: a brand-new style of portraiture introduced with Augustus and a radically new sense of the function of the portraits within the imperial dynasty. Carefully constructed similarity (as well as occasional difference) could be the whole point.
Caesar Augustus and the Art of Dynasty
Julius Caesar’s plans for the future, whatever they might have been, were assassinated with him. It was Augustus who established the permanent system, though sometimes fragile continuity, of one-man rule at Rome. Under the name of Octavian, this young man had had a notorious record of brutality and treachery in the fifteen years of civil war that Caesar’s assassination had sparked. But in one of the most astonishing political transformations ever, after his victory over his rivals, he re-invented himself as a responsible statesman, coined a respectable new name (‘Augustus’ means not much more, or less, than ‘revered one’) and proceeded to rule as emperor for more than forty years. He nationalised the army under his own command, he ploughed enormous sums of money into redeveloping the city and supporting the people, and he cleverly managed to get most of the elite to acquiesce in his de facto control of the political process, while disposing of those who did not. Every emperor afterwards included not just the name ‘Caesar’ but ‘Caesar Augustus’ in his official titles: the assassinated dictator who stood at the origin of the Roman system of one-man rule was forever linked to the canny politician (‘the tricky old reptile’ as one of his much later successors called him) who devised the long-term plan.50
One major problem that the tricky old reptile never entirely solved, however, was the system of succession. It is clear enough that he intended his power to be hereditary, but he and his long-standing wife Livia had no children together, and a sequence of chosen heirs died at inconveniently early ages. Eventually Augustus was forced to fall back on Tiberius, Livia’s son by her first husband, who in 14 CE became emperor (hence the title ‘Julio-Claudian’ now given to this first Roman dynasty, reflecting its mixed descent from the ‘Julian’ family of Augustus and the ‘Claudian’ family of Tiberius’s father). Even when such practical difficulties were overcome, the principles of succession remained hazy. Roman law had no fixed rule of primogeniture; if you wanted to succeed to the throne, it certainly helped to be the eldest son of the ruling emperor, but it was not a guarantee. No natural son succeeded his father in the first hundred years of imperial rule, until Titus followed Vespasian onto the throne in 79 CE. It is hardly a coincidence that Vespasian was also the only emperor of the first twelve who is said, indisputably, to have died of natural causes. All the other assassinations, forced suicides or just the rumours of poisoning (unfounded though they may have been) point to the moment of succession as a moment of uncertainty, anxiety and crisis.
The ‘look’ of the new brand of imperial portraits is inseparable from this new political structure and had very little to do with the personal traits of Augustus himself. The description in Suetonius is one of the give-aways on that; the portraits at least do not have the irregular teeth, hook nose and knitted eyebrows that the biographer picks out as the emperor’s distinguishing features. Even more telling is the slightly icy perfection of the image, which was derived directly from statues of the classical age of fifth-century Greece, and the glaring fact that the portraits made through all forty-five years of the reign were close to identical, from his bronze head found in Sudan, the loot from a local raid on the Roman province of Egypt (Fig. 2.9) to his statue found on the site of Livia’s villa outside Rome (Fig. 2.10a). It is almost Dorian Gray turned upside down: in Oscar Wilde’s novel, the portrait ages while its subject remains youthful; in the case of Augustus, right up to his death in 14 CE in his late seventies he was still being depicted as a young man. To us, it may well seem rather blandly idealising, and we look in vain for any sign of that personal, dynamic relationship between sitter and subject sometimes taken, over-romantically perhaps, to be the touchstone of the greatest modern portraiture (in this case, the sculptors had probably never met their subject). But in the history of Roman self-display, where warts and wrinkles had previously been the common currency, this youthful, classicising image was shockingly innovative; a style unprecedented in Roman art was designed to embody the emperor’s unprecedented new deal, and his break with the Roman past. Far from being routinised, uninspired, government-issue work, this image of Augustus was one of portraiture’s most brilliantly original and successful creations ever. Intended to ‘stand in’ for him among the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire who would never set eyes on him in person, it has ‘stood in’ for him ever since.51
TABLE 1
Table 1 Dynasties often trade on complexity; their multiple adoptions and remarriages are almost impossible to represent clearly on one page. This table is an intentionally simplified family tree of the Twelve Caesars, focussing on the main characters featured in the book.
It also set the standard for the portraits of his successors over the next centuries. Whatever the glimpses of individuality we may catch in Claudius’s slightly piggy eyes, Nero’s jowly double chin, or later in Trajan’s neat fringe, or Hadrian’s bushy beard, the emperors’ public portraits were about identity in the political, rather than the personal, sense. They were also about incorporating their subject into the genealogy of power and legitimating his place in the imperial succession. They provided a diagram of both the continuity and sometimes the ruptures in the right to rule. Through the tortuous family complexities of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (and later dynasties followed a similar pattern with a roster of bearded look-alikes in the second century CE), chosen successors were marked out by their sculptural similarity to the ruling emperor they were intended to replace—and by their similarity to the image of Augustus, back to whom the hereditary right to imperial power was traced.
It was not a series of absolutely identikit images: Tiberius can appear slightly more angular than Augustus (Fig. 2.10c), Caligula a little softer (Fig. 2.10d). But the general principle was that portraits were designed to make the emperor look the part, and for the first imperial dynasty looking the part meant looking like Augustus. Indeed, the biggest scholarly debates and disagreements around the identification of these Caesars have focussed not (as with the controversial pair in Pompeii) on whether a particular portrait is a member of the imperial family at all, but on which particular Julio-Claudian prince, princeling or short-term heir it is. Even the precise layout of the curls is not always up to producing a consistent answer. One delicate marble head in the British Museum, for example, has been identified as Augustus himself, as two of his short-lived heirs and as Caligula (Fig. 2.10e). An even more puzzling sculpture, in the Vatican, has been claimed for Augustus, Caligula, Nero and another of the would-be heirs (not to mention the possibility that it might be an Augustus later re-carved into a Nero, or even a Nero re-carved back into an Augustus) (Fig. 2.10f).52 It is hard to resist the conclusion that a perverse amount of scholarly energy has sometimes been devoted to drawing a fine line between subjects who were always intended to look the same.
That commitment to similarity inevitably alternated with a commitment to difference. After the fall of Nero and a year of civil war between 68 and 69 CE, the new dynasty of emperors—the ‘Flavians’, after its founder Flavius Vespasianus—was installed, and portraiture changed with the politics. Vespasian, as he is now usually known, adopted a ‘warts and all’ style, in contrast to the idealising perfection of the Julio-Claudian ‘look’. In general, the new emperor emphasised his down-to-earth approach to imperial power, his no-nonsense family background in a decidedly unfashionable part of Italy and his hard experience as a soldier. It was he, for example, who according to Suetonius put a tax on urine, a vital ingredient in the Roman laundry industry (hence the name ‘Vespasiennes’ for the old street urinals in Paris); and he cannily—if apocryphally—remarked that ‘money doesn’t smell’. His portraits too were obviously intended to play to assumptions of what down-to-earth realism looks like (Fig. 2.12). But there is no reason to suppose that they were any less a political construction than those of Augustus. In an attempt to exploit old-fashioned Roman tradition, he was carefully marking the visual distance between himself and the excesses of his predecessor Nero and the specious classicism shared by Augustus and his heirs. And that is how he has survived, been recreated and embellished, for two thousand years in the artistic imagination.53
What constitutes a ‘likeness’ has always been one of the big questions of art history and theory, from Plato to Ai Weiwei. There is always a debate about what exactly is (or should be) represented in a portrait: a person’s features, their character, their place in the world, their ‘essence’ or whatever.54 But our realisation that imperial portraits from Augustus on were largely focussed on political rather than personal identity was not shared by modern artists, historians and antiquarians before the twentieth century. They were aware of how disconcertingly youthful and idealising some of these images seemed (a feature that was sometimes explained away by the ‘vanity and the arrogance’ of the imperial subjects55). But their usual assumption was that not far behind all these ancient heads, the physical contours of real rulers, real persons and real personalities lay.
So indelibly real did they seem that, from the late sixteenth century on, imperial portraits were regularly used as accurate scientific specimens of people from the past, in a way that went far beyond the detection of the deformities of Caesar’s skull in the Tusculum head. There are some unexpected twists in this tale.
The Skull of Vitellius
Galba, Otho and Vitellius are three emperors who have not so far played a part in this chapter. This now half-forgotten trio ruled for just a few months each, before being assassinated or forced to suicide, during the civil wars in 68–69 CE that separated the Julio-Claudian dynasty from the Flavian. Suetonius’s picture of them is vivid, characterful but fairly one-dimensional: Galba, the elderly miser; Otho the libertine with a loyalty to Nero; Vitellius the glutton and sadist. Their ancient portraits have not recently claimed the kind of attention from art historians that those of Caesar or Augustus have attracted. In fact, despite several references—particularly in military contexts—to images of one contender for power being destroyed and replaced by those of another, it seems improbable that any of them during their brief moments of power, in the middle of civil war, would have had the time or resources to devote to circulating full-scale busts in marble or bronze; and they are not very likely candidates for posthumous commemoration. But earlier generations of scholars and artists (and even a few in recent years), wanting to complete a full line-up of Twelve Caesars, have looked for plausible heads to fill the gap between Nero and Vespasian.56
2.13 A portrait bust now in the ‘Room of the Emperors’ in the Capitoline Museums is identified as Otho, who ruled briefly in the civil wars of 69 CE, largely on the basis of what appears to be a wig (which Suetonius mentions that he wore). Otho was a friend and supporter of Nero, and—if he is correctly identified—a Neronian style may be reflected here, in contrast to Fig. 2.12.
The heads on coins and the descriptions in Suetonius again played the key part. Every Roman emperor, no matter how short his reign, issued coinage, because he needed ‘his’ cash to pay ‘his’ soldiers; and Suetonius picked out a useful detail or two here and there. Otho’s wig to cover his baldness (a throwback to Julius Caesar), or the elderly Galba’s hooked nose, were just about enough to recreate a plausible, if speciously convincing, ‘look’—and even to point (wrongly or not) to an ancient bust or two to fit the bill (Fig. 2.13).57 Vitellius was a special case—because of that distinctive head, the Grimani Vitellius (Fig. 1.24), discovered supposedly in excavations in Rome in the early sixteenth century, and apparently such an exact match for some of the images of the emperor on coins that it was taken to be a unique image of him ‘from the life’.
Perhaps the most recognisable and replicated of all imperial portraits, its fame went far beyond Veronese’s Last Supper and images of drawing lessons. As we shall see, this Vitellius has a cameo role in Thomas Couture’s vast reflection on Roman imperial vice and scarcely disguised allegory for contemporary French corruption, The Romans of the Decadence (Fig. 6.18); and it was the model for the corpulent, and rather wooden, emperor watching the gladiators in one of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s spectacular reconstructions of the amphitheatre, Ave Caesar! (Hail Caesar!). One copy of a copy of it, still on display in Genoa, is part of an extraordinary nineteenth-century pastiche, being embraced by the ‘Genius of Sculpture’ itself, as if it stood for the highest achievement of the sculptor’s art (Fig. 2.14).58
But, for many modern observers, there was more to this portrait than mere ‘art’. It was frequently used as a key example in those early scientific disciplines which read human character from external appearance: physiognomics, a discipline going back to antiquity itself, which claimed to be able to deduce temperament from facial features, often comparing humans to animal types; and phrenology, especially fashionable in the early nineteenth century, which claimed much the same from the shape of the skull (and so the shape of the brain within).59
In one of the most famous and detailed modern textbooks on this subject, by the Neapolitan scholar Giambattista della Porta, first published in the late sixteenth century, Roman emperors feature in the illustrations of historical characters: they include a Vitellius, not unlike the Grimani, whose features, and the size of whose head, are compared to an owl to demonstrate his ruditas (uncouthness) (Fig. 2.15).60 Phrenology was often a showier affair, with an established place on the popular lecture circuit in Victorian Britain. In one of his celebrity lectures in the 1840s, Benjamin Haydon—painter, art theorist, bankrupt and an enthusiast for reading skulls—featured a comparison between the head of Socrates, as it had been (imaginatively) re-created in ancient sculpture, and the head of the emperor Nero, predictably to the disadvantage of the latter.61 At roughly the same time, David George Goyder, a phrenological ideologue and eccentric enthusiast for a number of other lost causes (he was a minister of the Swedenborgian Church and staunch advocate of Pestalozzian education) went one better. According to a newspaper report of one of his lectures in Manchester, after an attack on the vested interests of establishment religion in their opposition to his new science (lining up Socrates and Galileo among others in its support), and an explanation of the basic system by which different parts of the brain were the seat of different talents and temperaments, the pièce de resistance involved a demonstration of his methods, complete with visual aids and, I imagine, all the razzmatazz he could muster. Among these was a ‘head of Vitellius’, whose skull, Goyder explained, was ‘round and narrow, not high’ indicating ‘an irascible, quarrelsome, and violent disposition’.62 He produced on stage a cast of the Grimani Vitellius.
