III

COINS AND PORTRAITS, ANCIENT AND MODERN

Putting Coins in the Picture

A Roman coin, featuring the head of the emperor Nero, shares the limelight in one of the most celebrated portraits painted by the fifteenth-century German artist Hans Memling. The sitter proudly displays to the viewer the bronze coin, on which—even at this small scale—it is possible to see clearly not only the emperor’s face, but his name and official titles running around the edge (‘Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus …’ as the heavily abbreviated Latin reads). Recent X-rays have shown that this coin—an almost exact copy of an authentic type minted in Gaul in 64 CE—was not part of the original design but one of several alterations and additions that Memling made in the course of his painting. Yet it was to become the most distinctive, and has been the most puzzling, element in the picture. Why did the painter decide to represent his subject clasping the head of one of the most notorious imperial villains? And why on a coin? (Fig. 3.1)

It would be easier to suggest a particular reason if we knew for sure the identity of the portrait’s main subject. Recent views have favoured Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian scholar, collector and politician of the late fifteenth century, who in the 1470s spent time in Flanders, where Memling was then working, and whose personal emblem included a palm tree and laurel leaves (unusual elements visible in the landscape background and on the lower edge of the portrait). If so, then the coin might be a flattering reference to the quality of Bembo’s own collection; for some Renaissance experts in ancient coinage insisted that, whatever the emperor’s despicable character, Nero’s coins were particularly fine works of art. But there have been plenty of other identifications and explanations too. One idea is that the coin makes a visual pun on the otherwise anonymous sitter’s name: perhaps this was a hint that he was called ‘Nerione’, a not uncommon Italian name at the time. Or maybe a more subtle moral point was being made. It might have been a reminder, as one art historian has recently put it, ‘that worldly fame and visual commemoration cannot always be associated with virtue’.¹

3.1  Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man with a Roman Coin (1471–74). Despite its tiny size (the whole painting is only about thirty centimetres tall), the coin at the bottom right attracts the viewer’s attention. Why is the (anonymous) sitter holding it up to us? And what is the significance of it being a coin of the emperor Nero?

3.2  Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder (c. 1475) outdoes Memling’s painting. It is twice the size (fifty-seven by forty-four centimetres), and the medal stands out even more forcefully, made of gilded gesso (plaster).

Whatever the right answer, there is a powerful triangulation here, to which I shall return, between the coin, the modern face and the very idea of the portrait. It was a triangulation that clearly struck Sandro Botticelli. Within a couple of years, he had upstaged and perhaps slightly parodied Memling’s composition. In his painting of another unknown sitter, Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder, Botticelli replaced the ancient coin of Nero with a commemorative medallion of the Florentine dynast Cosimo de’ Medici, and has rendered it not in simple paint, but as a three-dimensional model in gilded gesso, inset into the painting (Fig. 3.2).²

Almost a hundred years later, in his portrait of Jacopo Strada, Titian likewise pointed to the importance of coins in defining the image both of his subject, and of the Roman past. Strada was a prominent dealer, antiquarian and collector, and one of those Renaissance men who seems to have got everywhere (Fig. 3.3). He was born in Mantua, lived much of his life in Vienna and became extraordinarily influential (and rich) as agent and advisor to the Pope as well as to a number of northern European businessmen and aristocrats, from the Fugger bankers in Augsburg to the Habsburg emperors. In the 1560s Strada was often in Venice scouting for art and antiquities on behalf of Albrecht V of Bavaria, who had employed him to plan and acquire an appropriate collection for his palace in Munich (the Residenz). It was during one of these stays that he commissioned Titian to paint his portrait: the fee was to be an expensive fur lining for a cloak, no doubt like the one shown in the painting, and a fairly unscrupulous ‘leg-up’ for Titian in finding rich buyers for pieces from his workshop. Or so one of Strada’s jealous rivals alleged, while also suggesting that there was little to choose between painter and sitter when it came to commercial greed: ‘two gluttons at the same dish’ he wrote.

Strada’s lascivious avarice has often been seen as a prominent aspect of the portrait. He proprietorially fondles an ancient sculpture of Venus, while also displaying it to the viewer as if to a potential purchaser; and the pile of Roman coins lying on the table gestures to the monetary side of his business in ancient art. But there is more to it than that. What Titian also underlines here is the primacy of Roman coinage (especially imperial coinage) in Strada’s engagement with history. For, as well as the coins in front of him, which were of course collectibles rather than legal tender, he wears another hanging from the splendid gold chain around his neck and bearing what looks like an emperor’s head, as if it were a personal emblem or talisman. The two books prominent on the top of the cupboard behind continue the same theme by hinting at Strada’s scholarly writing. He was best known for his Epitome thesauri antiquitatum (Encyclopaedia of antiquities), first published in 1553, which offered brief biographies of ‘Roman’ rulers from Julius Caesar to the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (1500–58), illustrated throughout by portraits in the form of coin heads—some taken from his own collection.³

Another Venetian painter, Tintoretto, presented a similar idea even more flamboyantly, when he undertook the portrait of Strada’s teenaged son Ottavio, which his father commissioned along with his own (the two paintings, almost exactly the same size, being presumably intended to form a pair) (Fig. 3.4). It is hard to imagine that Tintoretto did not have one eye on the portrait that Titian was simultaneously creating in the same town. For young Ottavio, in surely deliberate contrast to the picture of Jacopo, is shown turning away from a naked Venus towards a slightly implausible flying figure of ‘Fortune’, who is showering on his lap a cornucopia (horn of plenty) of ancient coins. This no doubt dramatised some of the moral choices facing the young man, and could certainly be read as a presage of future wealth. But it also contrasted the relative paucity of ancient marble sculpture as a means of access to the world of antiquity with the amazing abundance of ancient coinage. As one sixteenth-century scholar put it, in modern Rome ancient coins ‘gush out in a never-ending stream’.⁴

3.3  Jacopo Strada was one of the most significant European figures in the study of (and trade in) antiquities in the sixteenth century. Titian’s large portrait of him, painted in the 1560s, underlines the importance of coinage in the cultural and scholarly world of the time: from the ancient coins scattered on the table to the specimen hanging around his neck. The title at the top right, identifying Strada, is a later addition.

Each of these paintings underlines the fact that there was far more to the coinage of imperial Rome than a useful aid in pinning down full-scale portraits of emperors in marble or bronze. For hundreds of years, coins and their heads played a bigger role in how emperors were imagined than any of those precise, or dodgy, comparisons of neck wrinkles and Adam’s apples might suggest.⁵ They were the only authentic ancient portraits easily available to anyone outside southern Europe. They turned up from the soil in their hundreds wherever the Romans had been, a tiny proportion of the millions of them which had once been minted in one of the world’s first truly mass-production industries (averaging, according to one brave attempt to calculate, some twenty-two million silver pieces a year from the central mint at Rome alone, not counting the bronze and gold, or the production of other mints). Even in Britain Shakespeare could expect his audience for Love’s Labours Lost to know what ‘the face of an old Roman coin’ meant.⁶

3.4  Tintoretto’s portrait of Jacopo Strada’s son Ottavio made a pair with the portrait of his father: it was painted at the same time, and the two pieces are the same size (roughly 125 centimetres by one metre). Both prominently feature coins and the goddess Venus (but whereas the father lovingly fingers his Venus, the son turns away).

But it is more than a question of familiarity. These tiny pieces of metal were often taken as the physical embodiment of the lessons that Rome’s history and its rulers could offer. Petrarch, for example, in the mid-fourteenth century pointedly gave a selection of Roman coins to Charles IV, just before his coronation in Rome as Holy Roman emperor. They were, he suggested, a better lesson in princely behaviour than a copy of his own book De viris illustribus (On Famous Men) for which Charles had explicitly asked. Another scholar, Cyriac of Ancona, repeated the trick in the early fifteenth century by giving the new Holy Roman emperor a coin of Trajan—whose temporary victories in the Near East in the second century CE offered an example for a crusade against the Ottoman Turks.⁷ Coins also provided an important model for re-creating emperors on paper, in paint and in stone, as well as a template for modern portraiture more generally. The final part of this chapter will unpick some of the connections that lead ultimately from those first images of Julius Caesar stamped on the coins of 44 BCE to the later tradition of Western secular portraiture almost down to our own day.

Coin Portraits

Petrarch’s gift to Charles IV did not bring the result he had hoped. He had singled out a head of Augustus (so realistic, he claimed, that it appeared to be ‘almost breathing’⁸), which would set an example to the new emperor and encourage him to take active steps, as Augustus had done, to restore the fortunes of Italy and of the city of Rome itself. But Charles did nothing of the sort; instead, after his coronation in Rome, he went straight back to his preferred home in Bohemia (in what is now the Czech Republic). He also apparently sent to Petrarch, as a gift in return, a coin of Julius Caesar. If so, he may have missed the point; for Charles seems to have been treating these imperial heads, not—like Petrarch—as the embodiment of a moral and political lesson, but as artistic commodities and tokens of reciprocity and friendship.⁹

But whatever their misunderstanding or different priorities on this occasion, Petrarch and Charles shared the widespread sense of the value and importance of the images of emperors on Roman coins, that was not finally lost until the nineteenth century (when the study of ‘numismatics’, as it began to be called, became simultaneously professionalised and sidelined thanks to its new status as an academic discipline). From the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth in particular, before the rediscovery of significant numbers of full-scale marble portraits, coins were generally thought to offer the most vivid, authentic and available vision of the rulers of the Roman world. It is true that there were long-running, and to us rather puzzling, debates about their original purpose: one of the biggest scholarly controversies of the Renaissance, only laid to rest in the late eighteenth century, centred on the question of whether most of these medaglie (as they were called in Italian) were ‘coins’ in the usual modern sense of the term—or whether they were not ancient small change at all, but rather commemorative medallions, struck in honour of those whose heads they featured. But there was universal agreement that, whatever their original function, they brought you closer than anything else could to the emperors in flesh and blood.¹⁰

We have long since lost the ability to respond to coins in this way, even as a rhetorical conceit, but Petrarch was not alone among early viewers in referring to them as ‘almost breathing’. Filarete, the creator of the great bronze doors of St Peter’s, also described the heads on coins as seeming ‘completely alive’; it was through the art of coinage, he went on, ‘that we recognise … Caesar, Octavian, Vespasian, Tiberius, Hadrian, Trajan, Domitian, Nero, Antoninus Pius and all the others. What a noble thing it is, for through it we know those who have died a thousand or two thousand or more years ago.’¹¹ Nor was Petrarch alone in focussing on their moral dimension. In the mid 1500s, Enea Vico—the antiquarian from Parma who wrote the first basic handbook on the study of ancient coins (as he strongly believed them to be), and died a scholar’s death, collapsing while carrying a precious antiquity to one of the dukes of Ferrara—also convinced himself of their reforming power. ‘I have seen some’, he wrote, ‘who were captured by such pleasure of looking at them, that they were deflected from their wicked habits and gave themselves … over to an honourable and noble life.’¹²

But equally important for many was the direct, unmediated access that coins offered to the classical world and its people, which gave them a historical reliability that outranked classical texts. As Vico again put it, they amounted to ‘a history that keeps silent and displays the truth whereas words … say whatever they please’. Almost two hundred years later, the English politician, playwright and essayist Joseph Addison made the same point more plainly. He had one of the characters in his semi-satirical Dialogues on ancient coinage insist that a coin was ‘much safer’ as evidence than Suetonius, because its authority came directly from the emperor himself, without the distorting intermediary of a biased biographer.¹³

It is hardly surprising, then, that for centuries, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, imperial coins were the most popular collectibles across Europe, and not just among the super-elite. The combination of their portability, their relative plenty and so their relative affordability put them within reach of men and women of far more modest means. (Despite some occasional posturing about ‘scarcity’, it is reckoned that in the mid-fifteenth century an emperor’s head on a silver coin probably sold for only about twice its metal value.¹⁴) The best evidence for the extent of this collecting is hidden away in the author’s ‘acknowledgements’ at the end of an account of the life of Julius Caesar, and of the main players in the civil wars after his death, published in 1563 by Hubert Goltzius, a writer, painter and printer from Bruges.¹⁵

Goltzius devotes some fifty pages at the start of the book to the coins of his subjects (beginning with five pages full of almost identical miniature images of Caesar with that wrinkly neck and Adam’s apple, drawn from slightly different specimens); and as if to clinch the point, the very last page of the book carries an illustration of Fortune pouring a stream of coins from a cornucopia, a rather more sedate version of the flying figure in Tintoretto’s portrait of the young Strada. In the eighteen-page section of ‘acknowledgements’ appended to the main text, he names and thanks the scholars and collectors whose holdings he studied in the course of his researches on the first of the Caesars and on other topics of Roman history. There are 978 of them in all, spread across Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries, carefully laid out in the chronological order in which he consulted them during his travels around Europe in 1556 and between 1558 and 1560.

Of course, acknowledgements in books were tricky rhetorical exercises, produced—then no less than now—as much for show as for gratitude. Yet, even allowing for some exaggeration and some carefully calculated inclusions, these names point to the social, cultural and international diversity of the collectors. They include a handful of the top rank of the European governing class—from the pope to the king of France and the Medici in Florence—and a few celebrity artists, Vasari and Michelangelo notably among them. They span Catholics, Calvinists and Jews, whose names are carefully inscribed in Hebrew, as well as native locals and ex-pats: four ‘Englishmen’ based abroad, plus one ‘Ioannes Thomas’ (who looks temptingly like ‘John Thomas’, though could be German) and even more ‘Spaniards’. The overwhelming majority are the now largely unknown local councillors, priests, lawyers and doctors in ordinary European towns.¹⁶ Their collecting ambitions were presumably tailored to fit their pockets. Only the very richest would have come close to the Medici who had several thousand specimens altogether, not all Roman, in their late fifteenth-century coin collection, or even to the German princess in the early eighteenth century who boasted of her precious series of Roman rulers up to seventh-century CE Byzantium (‘Now I have … a suit of emperors from Julius Caesar to Heraclius with no gaps’, she wrote, which would have amounted to about 100 in all).¹⁷ But they must all, at their different levels, have shared something of the pleasure of acquisition, classification, ordering, reordering and exchange that is part and parcel of collecting: from the thrill of the chase to the quiet satisfaction of completing the set.

It would, however, be quite wrong to imagine that coins were all locked away in cabinets, or hidden in boxes and purses, entirely for the private pleasures of their owners. Coins, more than anything else, stamped the faces of emperors onto the Renaissance cultural landscape. You would have seen them swinging around the necks of men like Jacopo Strada (the chain of cameo Caesars worn by the Armada victim (Fig. 1.13) was a showier and more expensive variant on the same fashion accessory). You would also have spotted them incorporated into objets d’art of many kinds in many different contexts, from libraries to churches.

3.5  A small sixteenth-century German casket (just over twenty centimetres in length), decorated back and front with gilded replicas of coins of the Twelve Caesars; here the second Six, from Galba top right, to Domitian bottom left. On either end is a selection of characters from early Roman history and myth.

Smart leather book-bindings featured imprints or ‘plaquettes’ of the coins of Caesar, Augustus and their successors. One precious casket, which belonged to the extravagant collection of art and bric-à-bric assembled in the sixteenth century by a junior branch of the Habsburg dynasty at Schloss Ambras near Innsbruck, was inset with gilded casts of twelve Roman coins, offering a line-up of Suetonius’s emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian (Fig. 3.5). Even that luxury item was upstaged by a roughly contemporary liturgical chalice from Transylvania, decorated with seventeen original coins of emperors and their wives, from Nero to the Byzantine Justinian (with what is probably a local first-century BCE coin to make up 18) (Fig. 3.6).¹⁸

There were all sorts of different messages in these displays. The imprints in the bindings may well have been intended to draw attention not so much to the contents of the book (it was not a question of a head of Julius Caesar being stamped onto the cover of his biography), but to the processes of its production, and to the similarity between the ancient method of striking coins and the modern method of printing.¹⁹ The coins on the casket from Schloss Ambras hinted no doubt at the precious contents within, as well as at the sense of order that came with a line-up of the Twelve Caesars. And if anyone should be tempted to assume that all this was ‘just decoration’, de-signified trinkets from a distant past or boasts of modern wealth, they should reflect on the experience of sipping communion wine out of a vessel that gave worshippers a close-up view of some of the greatest persecutors (as well as some of the most pious rulers) in the history of the church. These images, more often than not, were making a point; they were a big part of the Renaissance cultural currency.

3.6  An early sixteenth-century chalice from Nitra in modern Slovakia, with eighteen coins—all but one Roman—set into the decoration. Details: one of several Neros incorporated into the design (above), and his successor Galba (below).

It is barely an exaggeration to say that at this period wealthy, educated Europeans (and probably even a few of Shakespeare’s ‘groundlings’, to judge from his throwaway reference) would have recognised major coin types much as they later recognised celebrity ancient sculptures. It is only over the last three hundred years or so that Classical antiquity has become so overwhelmingly defined by marble. Before then, Julius Caesar’s coin portrait and probably the Nero in Memling’s painting would have had something of the fame that the Apollo Belvedere, the Dying Gaul or the Laocoon came later to enjoy.²⁰

Picturing Emperors

Images on coins, rather than in sculpture, were the models to which artists first turned when they wanted to create brand new imperial portraits to illustrate histories of Rome or the biographies of emperors.²¹ Sometimes this involved ingenious adaptation. One manuscript of Suetonius’s Lives, produced in Venice around 1350, includes some clever hybrid images, with distinctive heads and facial features drawn from coin portraits inserted into more generic imperial bodies (Fig. 3.7a and b).²² Far more commonly, as in Strada’s Epitome, the coins appeared as coins. The very earliest example of this is also the simplest. It is the work of the first decades of the fourteenth century, by a Veronese scholar, Giovanni de Matociis—or ‘il Mansionario’ (the sacristan), as he is more often known, from his position in the cathedral.

Il Mansionario has several claims to fame. For classicists even now his great achievement was to be the first reader since antiquity to realise that those Latin authors we call ‘Pliny the Elder’ and ‘Pliny the Younger’ were actually two different people—not, as was then thought, one and the same. But his compendium of imperial biographies, from Julius Caesar to Charlemagne (crowned Holy Roman emperor in 800 CE), was no less innovative. For he illustrated each of his ‘lives’ with a schematic diagram of a coin: a head in profile, surrounded by the emperor’s titles inscribed within two plain circles. In some of these, both the portrait and the inscription are clearly based on authentic specimens, which the author—who was probably also the artist—had seen or may even have owned. (That is clear with the image of Maximinus ‘the Thracian’, Fig. 3.7c and d.) In others, where presumably he needed a portrait but had no coin, he adapted or simply invented something according to the same formula.²³ It was the start of an artistic trend that would continue for more than two hundred years.

Some later versions of this basic scheme were far more detailed, carefully drawn and flamboyant. In a manuscript copy of Suetonius’s Lives, commissioned in the 1470s by Bernardo Bembo—the most plausible candidate to be the subject of Memling’s portrait—almost every one of the individual biographies opens with a page of what can only be described as a ‘numismatic extravaganza’: down one side runs a ‘column’ constructed out of some of the reverse (or ‘tail’) designs of the emperor’s coins; and at the foot of the page is the emperor’s head, so precisely reproduced—with both its portrait and inscription—that it is still possible to pinpoint the coin type from which it was taken. In Nero’s case, the coin is very similar indeed (though not absolutely identical) to the one so proudly displayed in Memling’s painting. Assuming we have the identity of the sitter right, it is very tempting to speculate that there may be a link here between the manuscript, the portrait and a particular prized specimen in Bembo’s own collection (Fig. 3.8).²⁴

3.7

(a) Galba from a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript of Suetonius’s Lives

(b) Coin of Galba (bronze sestertius minted 68)

(c) Coin of Maximinus Thrax (silver denarius minted 236–238)

(d) Maximinus Thrax (emperor 235–38) from il Mansionario’s compendium of imperial biographies

(e) Caracalla (emperor 198–217) from il Mansionario’s compendium of imperial biographies

(f) Coin of Marcus Aurelius (emperor 161–80), (silver denarius, minted 176–77)

(g) Altichiero’s Caracalla from the Palazzo degli Scaligeri in Verona (mid-fourteenth century)

(h) Nero from Fulvio’s early sixteenth-century Illustrium imagines

(i) Cato from Fulvio’s early sixteenth-century Illustrium imagines

(j) Eve from Rouillé’s mid-sixteenth-century Promptuaire des medalles

(k) Nero from the late fifteenth-century roundels, at La Certosa, Pavia

(l) Attila the Hun from the late fifteenth-century roundels at La Certosa, Pavia

(m) Julius Caesar from Horton Court, Gloucestershire, UK (about eighty centimetres in diameter)

(n) Vespasian from Raimondi’s luxury early sixteenth-century series of the Twelve Caesars (each one seventeen by fifteen centimetres); see also Fig. 4.8

3.8  The opening page of the life of Nero from a manuscript copy of Suetonius’s Lives commissioned in the 1470s by Bernardo Bembo (plausibly the sitter in Memling’s portrait, Fig. 3.1). The decoration is mostly drawn from coins: lower centre, the head of Nero with his name and titles; down the right-hand side, various reverse designs from the emperor’s coinage (from the top: the goddess ‘Rome’; military exercises; triumphal arch; celebration of the corn supply; Rome’s port of Ostia). Around the initial letter ‘E’ is a scene of Nero ‘fiddling while Rome burns’.

But, whatever the personal story, the important point is that between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries coins were more than just the best evidence available for the appearance of the Roman emperors; they provided a lens through which those rulers were repeatedly re-imagined and recreated in modern art. To ‘think emperor’ usually meant to ‘think coins’, not ‘marble bust’. That was true in almost every medium, from the relatively cheap to the hugely extravagant, from the mass-produced to the one-off. When Raphael’s friend and antiquarian collaborator Andrea Fulvio compiled his very successful, and (as we shall see) much imitated, illustrated compendium of great lives (Illustrium imagines or Images of the Great) in the early sixteenth century, his emperors and empresses were depicted, at the start of each mini-biography in the book, as if they were coin portraits (Fig. 3.7h).²⁵ When, at about the same time, Marcantonio Raimondi engraved his luxury set of heads of the Twelve Caesars, they too were shown as they appeared on coins (Fig 3.7n), as were many of the earliest marble reliefs of emperors from Renaissance Florence.²⁶ On a grander scale, if you look up at the ceiling painted by Andrea Mantegna in the ‘Camera picta’ (the Painted Room, also known as the Camera degli Sposi, or Bridal Chamber) in the Ducal Palace at Mantua, you still see eight emperors in roundels, staring down at you—their heads admittedly almost full-on, rather than in profile, but their titles running around the edge of each circle, just as on a coin (Fig. 3.9).²⁷

Thousands of prestige buildings across Europe, and some not so grand, built these distinctive coin-like profiles of emperors into their facades. Often just one or two carefully chosen Roman rulers were set on either side of a door or arch, but the great over-achievers in this respect were the monks (and their patrons) of La Certosa, the large Carthusian monastery near Pavia in north Italy. The exterior of their church was plastered with sculpture of all kinds; but its lowest band of decoration, and what hits visitors at eye-level as they enter the building or walk along its frontage, consists in a continuous line of sixty-one portrait roundels. Made in the late fifteenth century, each almost half a metre across, the vast majority of them are distinctively coin-like, depicting a large number of Roman emperors, plus some assorted companions (including a few early kings of Rome, a handful of near Eastern characters and Alexander the Great as the solitary Greek, plus Attila the Hun, some figures from myth and a small bunch of abstractions, including ‘Concord’ and ‘Speedy Assistance’) (Fig. 3.7k and l). Whatever the logic of the design (which continues to baffle commentators), the roundels find a striking, if rather homespun, echo a thousand miles away at Horton Court in rural England. Four limestone medallions decorate the rear wall of a garden extension, euphemistically titled a ‘loggia’, built in the 1520s for an owner who had been in Rome representing Henry VIII. Three of them—Julius Caesar, Nero and Attila the Hun—are part of the line-up at La Certosa and appear again in England in the characteristic idiom of magnified imperial coinage (Fig. 3.7m).²⁸

3.9  Looking up to Mantegna’s ceiling of the so-called ‘Camera picta’ in the Ducal Palace in Mantua, painted around 1470. At the centre, there is a trompe l’oeil opening apparently to the blue sky outside, and around that the sequence of eight emperors (from Julius Caesar to Otho) looking down.

Many other emperors-on-coins find a place in Renaissance painting, now often only half noticed. Even when they were making big points with the figure of Roman rulers, artists still commonly cast them in numismatic guise. When, for example, Vincenzo Foppa in the fifteenth century wanted to use the heads of Augustus and Tiberius to display and define the parameters of Jesus’s life on earth (born under the former, died under the latter), he chose two images in the style of coin portraits to decorate the arch that stood over his, more than usually chilling, scene of the crucifixion (Fig. 3.10).²⁹ It takes a much more determined inspection to make out the faded head of Augustus in a roundel fixed to the wall lurking above the figure of Jesus in Titian’s painting of Christ and the Adulteress—but there he is, once presumably standing out more clearly (Fig. 3.11). The interpretative possibilities here are intriguing. The emperor’s profile obviously locates the scene in Roman times, but it may also be an oblique reference to the story of Augustus and the Sibyl: instead of a vision of Jesus appearing to the emperor, we have a vision of the emperor glimpsed in the background of the ministry of Jesus. It may not even be too fanciful to see a parallel (or contrast) between Jesus’s famous reaction to the woman caught in adultery and brought to him for punishment (‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’) and the almost equally famous reactions of Augustus—whose legislative programme regularised the punishment for adultery (removing the threat of death), and who exiled his own daughter Julia for the crime. In line with the biblical story, which sets the law of Moses against that of Jesus, the presence of the Roman emperor in the painting nudges us to reflect more widely on competing moralities, different legal systems and the authority behind them. And all that hangs on a painted image of an imperial profile in the style of a coin.³⁰

It would be naïve to imagine that all Renaissance artists had a stash of ancient small change piled next to their drawing boards (though, if Goltzius was correct, and not simply boasting of his contacts, Vasari and Michelangelo maybe did); and equally naïve to assume that they had a commitment to archaeological accuracy in our terms. Sometimes, as in Memling’s painting or in some of il Mansionario’s portraits, it is possible to identify the type of coin that provided the model. But very often artists copied from other drawings and from printed sources as much as they copied from the original pieces themselves; they invented and adapted coin portraits as much as they faithfully replicated them. The coin-like images at La Certosa were precisely that, ‘variations on the theme’ of coinage rather than exact reproductions, and the artists and antiquarians were sometimes quite open about their procedures. One ambitious French compiler of biographies in the 1550s admitted that his artist had sometimes to work ‘from fantasy’ (phantastiquement), while stressing at the same time that these fantasies were ‘imagined with the advice and counsel of the most learned of our friends’: a nice attempt to combine learned scholarship and outright invention.³¹

3.10  Vincenzo Foppa’s Crucifixion (1456), just under seventy by forty centimetres, sets the scene within a classical arch. The identities of the unnamed emperors at the top of the painting have been debated, but they are best seen as Augustus (left) and Tiberius (right)—as if to embed the life of Jesus within the historical narrative of Rome.

3.11  Titian’s Christ and the Adulteress (c. 1510) illustrates the gospel story in which Jesus, (centre left) refuses to condone the stoning to death of a woman accused of adultery (far right)—although that was the punishment laid down under the Law of Moses. It is a large canvas, almost two metres wide, with a complicated history (it has been cut down from something even larger, with a whole figure—whose knee in blue and white is just visible behind the woman—removed from the right-hand side). Few people now notice the head of Augustus on the wall behind Jesus.

It is true that there were quite a few of what we would call ‘howlers’ in these artists’ work. Il Mansionario’s eccentric portrait of the emperor Caracalla, for example, is almost certainly copied from a coin of the emperor Marcus Aurelius; he had misunderstood the tricky Latin of the name and imperial titles inscribed on the coin and misidentified the emperor concerned (Fig. 3.7e and f). It was easy to do. Raimondi’s splendid head of Vespasian is certainly based closely on a coin portrait. But again: wrong coin and so wrong emperor. He too had misread the name and titles running around the edge and had actually reproduced an image of Vespasian’s son Titus (Fig. 3.7n).³²

Plenty of modern scholarly sniffiness has been directed at such errors (even though we are not always any better in reading the Latin, or getting the right emperor, than our Renaissance predecessors³³). ‘The width and variety of the ignorance of the Certosa sculptors are wonderful to behold … they cannot keep it to themselves,’ carped one recent study, which objected among other things to the mis-copied and mis-spelt Latin in the inscriptions surrounding the portraits.³⁴ A great deal of careful scholarly effort has also been devoted to disentangling the exact sources of these images, and to solving the puzzles of where precisely the artists found their coin models, and who copied what from whom. Some significant connections are revealed. Very close similarities, for example, show that il Mansionario’s manuscript must have been used a few decades later (mistakes and all) as the main source for an elaborate series of coin-like emperors painted on a ceiling in a palazzo in Verona; that is the one where some artist had fun drawing an irreverent imperial caricature in the preparatory layer underneath the finished painting (Fig. 1.16). There is a clear trail from coins, to manuscript, to replication in paint, as the unorthodox ‘Caracalla’ shows.³⁵

This is clever, and rather satisfying, detective work, but it sometimes misses the bigger point. Whether they were exact replicas, free adaptations, inventions, errors or copies of copies of copies, it was the coin-like form that was crucially important. Roman imperial coinage offered the most authentic images of those famous faces of the Roman past. More than that, the template of this coinage, and the numismatic idiom of portrait heads established in Rome by Julius Caesar, gave a stamp of authority to any portrait it framed. Though emperors were central, it was a style that could lend its authenticity to almost any figure from the past, male or female.

That is seen clearly in the fashionable Renaissance genre of the ‘portrait book’, which combined brief biographies of historical characters with a matching portrait. The first of these—Fulvio’s, published in 1517—largely focussed on figures from Roman imperial history, but it stretched at the margins from the god Janus and Alexander the Great at the beginning to the tenth-century CE Holy Roman emperor Conrad at the end. Even those outlying images followed the same numismatic format, sometimes based on real specimens of coinage, sometimes imaginatively (or mistakenly) adapted. One of the most engaging mistakes is an image of the god Bacchus, taken from a coin, passing for the portrait of the Roman Republican politician, and Julius Caesar’s adversary, Cato the Younger (Fig. 3.7i).³⁶

The same was true of the far more elaborate series of portraits in a book published in the 1550s by one of Fulvio’s successors in France, Guillaume Rouillé. His Promptuaire des medalles (Handbook of coins) ambitiously included hundreds of biographies and portraits from Adam and Eve, through the Greeks and Romans, mortals and immortals, to the reigning king of France, Henry II. The drawings were less formulaic, more clearly characterised, than Fulvio’s rather sketchy and look-alike series of profiles. But, in a way that now seems faintly ridiculous, they still pressed every subject into a numismatic frame. On the first page, for example, Eve is represented like a Roman empress, with an inscription around her head mimicking that on a Roman coin: ‘Heva ux(or) Adam’ (Eve, wife of Adam) (Fig. 3.7j). Rouillé was the man who proudly pointed to his own combination of fantasy and learned scholarship; you can see why.³⁷

A similar combination is found at La Certosa. Whatever the deficiencies in Latin shown by the sculptors or designers, they depicted most of the non-imperial subjects who rubbed shoulders with the emperors—from Romulus and Remus to Nebuchadnezzar—as versions of the Roman emperors themselves, albeit slightly exoticised ones. Who knows if they spotted the ironies that resulted? But it is hard now not to be struck by the fact that Attila the Hun, Rome’s infamous enemy, was represented at both La Certosa and Horton Court according to an idiom originally devised to assert Roman autocratic power on coins (Fig. 3.7l).³⁸

This centrality of imperial coinage in the Renaissance visual repertoire, and in its reconstruction of historical characters, is nowhere better or more surprisingly summed up than in a few lines of a once popular biography of Jesus, La humanità di Christo (The humanity of Christ), first published in 1535 by Pietro Aretino—satirist, theologian, pornographer and friend of Titian. The narrative of La humanità frequently refers to visual images, but in the episodes surrounding the trial and crucifixion of Jesus it does so in a very unexpected way indeed. When he tries to capture the appearance of some of the protagonists, Aretino compares them not simply to Roman emperors (though that alone points to the familiarity of emperors as visual types); he explicitly compares them to how those emperors were represented on their coins. Two of the Jewish priests involved in the trial, Annas and Caiaphas, are likened respectively to ‘the head of Galba as you see it on medaglie’ and to ‘the coin portrait of Nero, with something of the menacing look of Caligula’. Whatever the awkward theological issues raised by such comparisons, they are as clear a demonstration as you could want of how imperial coin portraits were embedded in a Renaissance ‘way of seeing’, and how they offered a standard against which to imagine the faces of the past.³⁹

It was not the faces only of the past, but of the present too. For one of the most influential and radical inventions of early Renaissance art was the convention, which lasted into the nineteenth century, of representing living subjects—kings or local bigwigs, statesmen or soldiers, even writers or scientists—in the guise of Roman emperors. These are the statues, busts, paintings and medallions, whether toga-clad, breastplated or laurel-wreathed, which still fill museums and stately homes, parks and public squares by the thousand. They are relatively little discussed in general histories of portraiture, partly no doubt because their classical idiom is easily mistaken for a reactionary artistic form, stale antiquarianism or simply a trite attempt to cash in on the prestige of ancient Rome (their standard blanket description used in modern scholarship—all’antica (in ancient style)—though strictly correct is often also a polite dismissal).⁴⁰ Their very familiarity often obscures their ambivalence, political edginess and the debates about the nature of representation and the function of portraits that they prompt.

It is worth at this point taking a forward look and reconnecting with the richness, complexity and dangers of this tradition, as we see it from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century—before returning to its Renaissance origins in the work of medal makers and sculptors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Western secular portraiture of living subjects was born in dialogue with the style, faces and dress of the rulers of ancient Rome. This was, of course, as they appeared not only in stamped metal, but in marble sculpture too. Yet one of the main messages of Memling’s famous painting of the man with his coin of Nero was to remind viewers that ancient imperial images, on coins in particular, were central to the presentation of the modern face. We shall see just how central.

The Romans and Us

For many years, until they were removed in 2012 to the nearby museum, two large marble statues of King George I and King George II stood at the entry to the Cambridge University Library, by leading sculptors of their day—one by John Michael Rysbrack, the other by Joseph Wilton. ‘The Georges’, father and son, who between them ruled Britain from 1714 to 1760 and were major benefactors of the library, stood resplendent in the guise of Roman emperors clad in battle kit that was more ceremonial than practical. Their faces were pure eighteenth-century, with (it was hard not to imagine) a slight Hanoverian sneer; but they were both depicted in a decorated breastplate, a leather skirt (the so-called ‘feathers’ or pteruges) over their thighs, close-fitting boots, and with a laurel wreath on their heads; George II also embraced a globe, an obvious symbol of imperial domination. Many of the students and staff who regularly walked past them did not notice their attire. Others put it down to a harmless quirk of eighteenth-century artistic fashion, to a faintly silly form of fancy dress, or to the mammoth conceit (or desperation) of two rather ordinary monarchs who fancied themselves as Roman emperors, and certainly did not rule the world. ‘Thank goodness they’re gone, the pompous puffed-up royals,’ was how one library user greeted their removal (Fig. 3.12).⁴¹

3.12  ‘The Georges’ who once stood at the entrance to the Cambridge University Library. By Michael Rysbrack (King George I, 1739, left) and Joseph Wilton (King George II, 1766, right), both of these life-size statues are dressed up in the military costume of Roman emperors, and crowned with laurel wreaths.

These Georges are just a couple of those vast numbers of portrait sculptures in early modern Europe, the British Empire, and later America which cast their subjects in Roman imperial guise, albeit in subtly different combinations of contemporary and ancient style.⁴² In some cases, flowing modern wigs make an incongruous partner for Roman imperial armour. In some just the hint of a toga around the neck of a bust is enough to signal the Roman aspect of the image. Others are floridly ‘antique’. Not far from the University Library, in the gardens of Pembroke College (demoted from its original central London location), sits an early nineteenth-century bronze statue of the prime minister William Pitt the Younger, by Richard Westmacott. He is draped in a full toga, carrying a scroll and seated on what looks suspiciously like a throne.⁴³

The vast majority of these sculptures are generic images. The Georges are depicted in the standard idiom of ‘Roman emperors’, with no reference back to any particular ancient ruler or statue. Only occasionally in marble or bronze is there any sign of a direct comparison between the modern sitter and an individual ancient imperial figure. Canova’s portrait of Madame Mère as ‘Agrippina’ is the clearest example of that, though Rysbrack did something similar when he ‘merged’ the features of one of his slightly less elevated aristocratic subjects with those of Julius Caesar.⁴⁴ In paintings, there are more often pointed cross-references. Sometimes that is for fun. It was not surprising, given their interests in the antiquities of Italy, that George Knapton in the eighteenth century should have painted some of the members of the London ‘Society of Dilettanti’ in Roman imperial outfits. But when he based his portrait of young Charles Sackville directly on Titian’s version of Julius Caesar from his cycle of Caesars, it was a two-edged joke meant to appeal to the learned and occasionally tiresomely witty Dilettanti. For Sackville was a notorious ‘rake’, keen cricketer and opera-buff, who had dressed up as a Roman in a typically louche carnival parade while in Florence in the 1730s, an occasion referred to in the text beside his shoulder on the painting. The comparison of this pleasure seeker, or wastrel, with the commanding presence of the Roman dictator is presumably intended to be glaringly implausible, while at the same time it also hints at some of the more disreputable aspects of Caesar’s own career. Determined conqueror he may have been, but his sex life was in the same league as Sackville’s (Fig. 3.13, with Fig. 5.2a).⁴⁵

Less of a joke, and more intriguing, is a portrait of Charles I by Anthony van Dyck, painted in the 1630s, a decade or so before the king’s execution. It shows him long-haired with his characteristic beard, in a suit of modern armour, his crown and military helmet perched just behind him—with nothing at first sight to link the painting to Roman rulers in any way. But the precise stance of the king, his grip on the baton, as well as the shiny angular appearance of the breastplate, were unmistakeably based on another emperor in Titian’s series, of which Charles was by then the owner, after acquiring them among his great haul of paintings from Mantua (below, pp. 171–77). In this case, the model is Otho, the extravagant, effeminate libertine (as the Romans stereotyped him), whose main, perhaps only, virtue was to have faced inevitable defeat in civil war with a brave and dignified suicide. It is hard to imagine that this was originally intended as coded criticism of the king. Van Dyck, who was the leading creator of Charles’s royal image and the restorer of some of Titian’s series of emperors when they first arrived at the English court, would be a very unlikely sponsor of subversion; and Charles himself seems to have been particularly keen on the original painting of Otho, specially commissioning a print of it, alone out of all Titian’s Caesars. Yet any viewer who spotted the source—and many surely did, since it was part of the best-known set of imperial images at the time—would have been rewarded with thoughts of the uncomfortable similarities between Otho and the English king—particularly after Charles’s execution, the dignity of which stood in contrast to many other aspects of his career. As Madame Mère later found, there was always liable to be a reputational risk in looking too much like a particular member of the Roman imperial family (Fig. 3.14 with Fig. 5.2h).⁴⁶

3.13  George Knapton’s mid-eighteenth-century portrait of Charles Sackville, just under a metre high, is closely modelled on Titian’s version of Julius Caesar (Fig. 5.2a). The Latin text at his shoulder refers to Sackville dressing up as a Roman consul at a carnival parade (or Roman ‘Saturnalia’) in Florence in 1738.

3.14  Seen here in an eighteenth-century copy, the pose of van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles I (almost a metre and a half high) was based on Titian’s version of the emperor Otho (Fig. 5.2h)—known for his libertine lifestyle but a noble death. The ‘un-Roman’ royal crown is relegated to the background.

There were, however, some awkward political issues underlying even those generic images of ‘sitter as emperor’. It was all very well to imagine a monarch or dynast in imperial guise. But at his country house of Houghton Hall in Norfolk Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister under the Georges, had his own bust, swathed in its marble toga, surrounded by those of Roman emperors—as if to align himself with them. How could this not be another version of the ‘Andrew Jackson problem’? How could a modern republican, anti-monarchist, radical, or even an elite Whig like Walpole, who supported only constitutional, parliamentary versions of one-man-rule, comfortably adopt for himself any image with such resonance of autocracy, or hint at such a clear parallel with the wielders of imperial power?⁴⁷

This has always been a difficulty for those who looked back to—and wanted to ape—the glory days of Rome before the dictatorship of Caesar, in the free democratic Republic, with all its heroic tales of liberty, bravery and self-sacrifice. Glory days they might (or might not) have been; but how on earth did your portrait make it clear that you were being represented as a Roman democrat, not a Roman emperor? For, although a wealth of contemporary literature survives in genres as diverse as comic drama, hard-core philosophy and private letters, little material trace of the Republic has been preserved, whether in architecture or sculpture. The frustrating paradox is that almost all the physical remains from ancient Rome come from the ‘decadence’ of the Empire, from the ‘city of marble’ with which Augustus replaced, as he boasted, the old Republican ‘city of brick’.⁴⁸

If you want to reimagine the world, or the style, of the Republican heroes and their virtues, you more or less have to invent it—and them. From Cincinnatus, the Republican patriot who in the fifth century BCE saved Rome then selflessly laid down his power and returned to his farm, to Cicero, their faces and features have been entirely lost. Portraiture certainly had deep roots in Roman tradition, but of those few examples from the time before Julius Caesar that have survived, none, or hardly any, can reliably be named—except in quotation marks, and with an even heavier injection of wishful thinking than in the identification of emperors. Nor, until Caesar, were there contemporary heads on coins to match and compare. Roman prestige portraiture (I am not here talking about more humble images on grave stones) was overwhelmingly imperial. It did not all depict emperors themselves, or course, but almost always it adopted or adapted those imperial styles. It is hard to escape the awkward fact that to be represented as a Roman in the modern world is almost bound to carry with it whiffs of autocracy.

3.15  Horatio Greenough’s vast statue of George Washington (1840) was an awkward combination of an imagined Roman hero and the Greek god Zeus (inspired by a colossal statue that once stood in Zeus’s temple at Olympia). For several decades in the nineteenth century it seemed safer to house it outdoors near the Capitol. Here it is admired(?) by a group of African-American schoolchildren, around 1900. It is now in the National Museum of American History.

Some artists—like the seventeenth-century German silversmith who crafted a large silver-gilt dish now in the British royal collection—seem to have embraced (or ignored) the difficulties. In the centre he recreated one of the most glorious stories of Republican virtue (Mucius Scaevola at the very end of the sixth century BCE proving his bravery to the enemy by thrusting his right hand into burning flames); while all around the dish’s rim, as witnesses to the scene, is an incongruous group of imperial autocrats in their miniature roundels—from Julius Caesar and Augustus, to a number of later rulers, most of whom, Galba included, were victims of civil war.⁴⁹ Others did try to escape the problem, if not always successfully. In America, Horatio Greenough’s colossal portrait of George Washington evokes the Republican Cincinnatus in the act of returning his sword of office and so returning power to the people. But it was not just far too big and weighty for its surroundings (it nearly broke the floor of the rotunda of the Capitol when it was installed there in 1841); it also disastrously overplayed its hand in modelling the American republican hero on a classical Greek god (Fig. 3.15).⁵⁰

3.16  In the 1760s, Joseph Wilton (the sculptor of the younger George, Fig. 3.12) attempted to give Thomas Hollis—British activist and supporter of the American revolution—anti-monarchical credentials within a Roman idiom. This is spelled out on the base of the portrait bust, where you can just make out that Wilton has carved the symbols (daggers and a ‘cap of liberty’) used on a famous coin issued by the assassins of Julius Caesar.

More often, portraits of radicals and modern republicans on both sides of the Atlantic opted for a particularly austere version of Roman style, without for example the ballooning drapery of a voluminous toga or the highly decorated armour. It was not so much that they were following a Roman Republican model as is often claimed (for there were hardly any Republican models to follow), they were creating a republican idiom by stripping the imperial portrait of any trace of luxury and excess.⁵¹ Even that was not necessarily enough. In his bust of Thomas Hollis, a wealthy and well-connected eighteenth-century British radical (who followed his anti-monarchical principles in making benefactions to Harvard University), Wilton not only presented his subject reduced to bare flesh, but carved onto the base a pair of daggers and a ‘cap of liberty’ (the small hat worn by Roman slaves when they were freed by their masters). This was a reference to the design of a coin issued by the assassins of Julius Caesar in the aftermath of his murder, celebrating the freedom of the state that had been won by violence; and it was a clear signal of Hollis’s politics. But for us it is also a clear signal that the idea of monarchical power was very deeply embedded in this Roman idiom—and that you had to take drastic steps to counter it successfully (Fig. 3.16).⁵²

3.17  Two versions of a nineteenth-century royal birthday present, by the German artist Emil Wolff. Both life-size sculptures of Prince Albert in ancient dress, the later version on the right (of 1849) lengthens his ‘skirt’ in an attempt to give a more sober and serious impression.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert faced similar problems a hundred years later, as emerges from the story of a life-size marble sculpture of the prince that—with typical royal bravura or self-regard—he himself commissioned as a birthday present for his new wife. Representing Albert in imperial guise presented some difficulty, for the obvious reason that he was not the modern emperor, but merely the consort of a ruling queen. The solution of the sculptor, Emil Wolff, in consultation with the subject himself, was to democratise the imperial style with gestures to the iconography of the classical Athenian warrior: the armour that Albert wears is not very far from that of the Georges, but at his feet rests a recognisably Greek helmet, and he holds a Greek shield to match. It was hardly a success. When the first version arrived, Victoria politely said that it was ‘very beautiful’, but ominously added in her diary that ‘we know not yet where to place it’. It ended up being placed well out of sight in a back corridor in their palace on the Isle of Wight—as, she explained, ‘Albert <thought> the Greek armour, with bare legs and feet, looked too undressed to place in a room’. Meanwhile a second version was commissioned, with sandals and a longer ‘skirt’ to cover a little more of the legs, and this was put on display in Buckingham Palace in 1849. It is a revealing story not only of how kings and queens can have just as embarrassing failures with their birthday gifts as any of us, but of how easily this Roman idiom could implode. Far from creating a figure of distinction, the ancient costume turned Albert into a man in slightly incongruous fancy dress—rather as some Cambridge library users later saw the Georges (Fig. 3.17).⁵³

3.18  The battle of Quebec between the French and the British in Canada in 1759 resulted in a British victory, but in the death of James Wolfe, the British commander. Benjamin West’s decision to depict his last moments in contemporary eighteenth- century rather than ancient Roman costume was much discussed, even though West was not the first to use a modern idiom for this scene. But the large canvas (more than two metres wide) is striking in other respects: from the Christ-like pose of the dying man to the prominent role of the First Nation Canadian in the composition.

The anxieties of the royal couple also point to bigger questions about the nature of this ancient style, about what exactly was being represented in these modern imperial look-alikes, and about the conventions of viewing that underpin them. A painting by Benjamin West—The Death of General Wolfe (the British commander killed at the battle of Quebec against the French in 1759)—had brought these questions dramatically to the surface more than fifty years before, in the early 1770s (Fig. 3.18). West was an American who had studied classical art at first hand in Italy (where he perceptively, or notoriously, compared the famous statue of the Apollo Belvedere to a ‘young Mohawk warrior’⁵⁴), but worked for much of his life in England, serving as the second president of the Royal Academy after Sir Joshua Reynolds. His depiction of Wolfe became the focus of heated debate because, among other things, he had chosen to portray the general and his companions in contemporary eighteenth-century dress rather than in Roman-style armour or togas.

The painting itself has often been over mythologised as a revolutionary turning point. It was certainly not the first such image to use modern dress (George Romney and Edward Penny had already depicted Wolfe’s death in the same contemporary idiom several years earlier⁵⁵), and there were plenty of later paintings and sculpture that went on using an antique style. Not all the visitors and critics who discussed the painting in the 1770s even mentioned the costume anyway, which may have been the preoccupation of a fairly tight circle of art theorists and their patrons. William Pitt the Elder, for example, prime minister like his son, was more interested in complaining about ‘too much dejection’ on the face of Wolfe and the surrounding company. If it seems, to a modern audience at least, that he had entirely missed the point of the painting, he was probably in tune with the majority of viewers at the time, who were more interested in the emotion of the scene than in what the characters were wearing.⁵⁶

Nonetheless, the debate about the clothing chosen is significant not only for its high-profile participants (which partly ensured the dispute’s fame) but also for articulating so clearly some big issues of interpretation. West’s own position is unsurprising. When challenged to defend his choice, he insisted that Canada, where Wolfe had died, was ‘a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and Romans’, which made it especially ridiculous to dress up his characters in ancient costume. ‘I consider myself’, he went on, ‘as undertaking to tell this great event to the eye of the world; but if, instead of the facts of the transaction, I represent classical fictions, how shall I be understood by posterity!’ It was posterity that was one of the concerns of his opponents. Joshua Reynolds not only objected to the lack of dignity in the contemporary dress, but also argued that it was only classical costume that could give such a heroic moment in history a timeless permanence; without it, in a few years, the events depicted would simply appear out of date.

Most of this information, including the direct quotations, comes from a highly tendentious source: a laudatory biography of West himself. It is meant to pave the way for West’s eventual victory over his critics, which culminates, we are told, in Reynolds admitting his error: ‘I retract my objections … and I foresee that this picture will not only become one of the most popular, but occasion a revolution in art.’ What is more, King George III, whom Reynolds had originally dissuaded from buying it, is supposed to have ended up regretting that he had failed to acquire such a masterpiece. But, tendentiously reported or not, these disagreements vividly capture some of the much deeper questions that underlie these different idioms of representation: questions about different ways of representing the present, about how the passing of time may upset the temporality of an image by turning present into past and about how the boundaries between past and present are defined by, and challenged in, art.⁵⁷

This particular debate is fashioned very much in the style of elite eighteenth-century London, with its elegant repartee between rival painters, and a walk-on part for the king, and even at one point for the Archbishop of Canterbury too, predictably on Reynolds’s side; it is almost unthinkable in any other context or at any other date. Even so, the basic logic of these memorable exchanges can help us pinpoint some of the issues that must have been on the agenda centuries earlier, as we return now to probe a little more carefully into the early traditions in the Italian Renaissance of representing modern living subjects—and dead emperors.

The Renaissance and the Romans

It is often assumed that underneath the decision to represent modern worthies in Roman guise lay a strong alignment between classical and contemporary virtue—whatever the potential political mismatch and the inevitable hints of autocracy. That is, in part, true. In eighteenth-century Britain, more clearly than anywhere else, the investment of the elite in Latin literature and in its language of moral and philosophical debate certainly encouraged the idea that Roman portraits could act as a mirror of—or a template for—the gentleman. When Voltaire remarked in the 1730s that ‘the members of the English Parliament are fond of comparing themselves to the old Romans’, he was referring to what many modern scholars would call ‘self-fashioning’: the ancient Romans provided an important model by which these men (and I mean men) learned to behave and to see themselves. But there was more to it. For the portrayal of a living subject as an ancient Roman—and more specifically as an imperial Roman—went back much earlier, to the beginnings of the modern traditions of portraiture in the West.⁵⁸

Among the many cultural shifts and subversions of the Italian Renaissance, there were two related revolutions in ways of seeing and ways of representing, to which we are in part still the heirs. The first was the radical change, which happened—at different rates in different media, contexts and places—between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, in how Roman emperors and other characters from the classical past were portrayed in art. As I have so far only hinted, in the Middle Ages these ancient rulers standardly appeared in the guise of their modern equivalents. In the stained glass at Poitiers, the emperor Nero wears a medieval crown, and the robes of a twelfth-century king to match (without the name ‘Nero’ written underneath, we would have trouble identifying him—even with the little devil on his back, and the nearby crucifixion of Saint Peter) (Fig. 1.6). And in one gloriously illustrated manuscript of Suetonius’s Lives produced in 1433, each of the emperors appears in the regal costume of the fifteenth century, with just the occasional laurel wreath to gesture to his Roman identity: Tiberius, for example, is clad in an elaborate red and gold tunic with stockings underneath, while Augustus in his encounter with the Sibyl—needless to say, not a story told by Suetonius, but here used as the emperor’s identifying image—looks suspiciously like a fifteenth-century bishop (Fig. 3.19).⁵⁹

3.19  Full-page illustration of Augustus and the Sibyl, from a manuscript edition of Suetonius’s Lives, produced in Milan in 1433. The subject is the same as that of Fig. 1.17, but in a strikingly medieval style and costume. The Sibyl on the right points to the Virgin and Child in heaven. The emperor apparently wears armour under his robe, and holds a staff in his right hand and a symbol of the universe in his left.

The contrast is glaring with the depictions in ancient Roman style that we explored in other manuscripts earlier in this chapter. There was a considerable period of overlap between these two idioms (the ecclesiastically dressed Augustus is later than some of those illustrations of Suetonius based closely on ancient coins). Nonetheless, as time went on, Renaissance artists increasingly re-created—and Renaissance viewers expected—emperors who looked like Romans, not like their own contemporaries. By the end of the sixteenth century virtually no artists at all were dressing up their ancients in modern clothes. This change is often put down to a growing knowledge and understanding of the authentic remains of the classical past, both literary and visual. But, important as that antiquarian expertise was, it does not explain everything. The artists who worked in the earlier idiom knew perfectly well that Roman emperors wore togas not doublets and hose—just as Shakespeare knew that Romans did not wear breeches, as the actors in his Julius Caesar did, and Joshua Reynolds knew that General Wolfe had not died at the battle of Quebec kitted out in a Roman breastplate and military skirt.

Underneath these major changes in Renaissance art lie some of the issues that were made explicit a few hundred years later in the clash between Reynolds and Benjamin West. At stake were changing answers to questions of how the present and the past were to be envisaged, and how the similarities and differences between the ancient and modern worlds were to be expressed. It can hardly be a coincidence that, more or less simultaneously with the ‘correct’ representation of Roman emperors, a parallel revolution in the portraits of the living saw modern subjects for the first time represented in the guise of ancient Romans. To oversimplify somewhat (because, as we shall see, there were always exceptions and other idioms available), the European Renaissance—especially, in the first instance, in Italy—was a time when Roman emperors ceased to be portrayed as if they were modern rulers, and modern rulers started to be portrayed as if they were Roman emperors.⁶⁰

The exact reasons for these changes are now irrecoverable, and many different factors and inheritances must have been involved, in what was part of a much bigger artistic revolution. Roman imperial heads themselves, whether in miniature metal or occasionally full-sized marble, were certainly one impetus behind the distinctive conventions of portraiture that developed in this period; but I am not trying to suggest that they were the only driver. Specific earlier traditions also played a part, from personalised seal stones, busts containing relics of saints (so-called ‘reliquary busts’), to the tiny lifelike figures of the donors and sponsors often incorporated into major religious paintings. And the growth of portraiture as a genre was no doubt linked to wider cultural and intellectual trends (the Renaissance ‘discovery of the individual’, as one popular over-generalisation would have it).⁶¹ There are also any number of micro-differences across Europe, and in different media, even if the overall pattern is similar almost everywhere.

That said, images of the Caesars were hugely influential in the development of the visual language of modern portraiture, especially though not entirely of men, in which an idiom of the past was repeatedly adapted for the representation of the present. This was what Reynolds’s shorthand would later present as ‘timelessness’.

It can hardly be a coincidence that what is almost the earliest freestanding portrait bust of a living person to have survived from the modern era in the West is cast in Roman imperial style. This is the marble sculpture by Mino da Fiesole, produced around 1455, depicting Giovanni, the son of Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence; it is reckoned to come a close second in date to the very earliest bust, a portrait, also by Mino, of Cosimo’s other legitimate son, Piero, carved just a couple of years before, in 1453–54. What distinguishes the image of Giovanni from that of his brother is that he is dressed in elaborate antique armour, not out of character with the garb of the Cambridge Georges. It is impossible to know what exactly prompted the sculptor to adopt this particular idiom (Giovanni had a keen interest in classical antiquity, but so also did Piero). Whatever the reason, it is a powerful sign that the conflation of modern sitter and ancient emperor, however differently and intensely it might have been inflected later, was embedded at the very earliest stages of this artistic tradition (Fig. 3.20).⁶²

Once again, however, it is coins and medaglie that defined this conflation most clearly, and even earlier. I am not referring only to those skilful replicas or clever fakes of ancient coinage made by the likes of Cavino, or the ‘coin-like’ images that defined the faces of the past, as at La Certosa. The living too had a stake in this. From as early as the 1390s, we find a rich and illustrious tradition of bronze portrait medallions of modern subjects (medaglie, or medals, in our sense), on a rather larger scale than ‘real’ coinage, as much as several centimetres in diameter. They regularly carried images of their sitters which mimicked the Roman emperor’s head on coins (or, where a woman was the subject, that of his wives or daughters), often with an identifying inscription around the profile. And these were accompanied by a whole variety of reverse (or ‘tail’) designs, usually celebrating the virtue of the person concerned, and sometimes copying closely what was found on an ancient coin. Here the modern portrait had almost totally merged with the Roman (Fig. 3.21).

In museum cases today, these medals tend to be overlooked, just as arrays of ancient coinage are. Our modern preoccupation with portraits in paint or life-size marble has tended to deflect attention from small-scale plaques of bronze. But in the Renaissance, in northern Europe as much as in Italy, they had enormous political and social importance, being widely circulated to spread the image of their subject (‘the currency of fame’ as they have been called, even though they were never coinage in the monetary sense). Many were the work of leading and experimental artists, not the hackwork of mass production—even if replicability was part of their appeal.⁶³

3.20  Two sons, two idioms: on the left Mino da Fiesole’s portrait of Piero, son of Cosimo de’ Medici (1453–54); on the right, a couple of years later, in classical style, his brother Giovanni; both are almost life-size.

The connection they paraded between images of ancient emperors and images of the living, and so also between the past and the present, was part of their point. One of his learned correspondents actually wrote to Leonello d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, who commissioned thousands of such medallions, congratulating him on having appeared on them ‘after the fashion of the ancient Roman emperors, with on one side your name inscribed next to the representation of your head’. Other commentators suggested more nuanced links between the Roman coins and the medaglie of the present day. Filarete, who produced some splendid examples of modern imperial medallions himself, referred to the practice of burying them in the foundations of new buildings (following what was believed to be the Roman custom of burying coins); and, in another nice twist on the conflicting temporalities of representation, he speculated on how future archaeologists would one day discover them, just as his own contemporaries found such things when they dug down into the ruins of ancient Rome. The fact is that wherever you look in the theory and practice of Renaissance portraiture, Roman emperors are not far away.⁶⁴

3.21  The classical and the Renaissance merge. A bronze medallion by Pisanello (about ten centimetres in diameter) commemorating Leonello d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, with his titles in very abbreviated Latin around the edge: ‘GE R AR’ identifies him as the son-in-law (GENER) of the king (REGIS) of Aragon. On the reverse, marking the marquis’s marriage, a little lion (‘Leonello’) is being taught to sing by Cupid (under the signature of Pisanello).

That is one thing that Memling’s portrait, with which we began this chapter, is insisting on. Of course, here as always, the combination of the modern subject with a particular emperor raises troubling questions—which do not go away however hard you might assert that it is all a clever pun, a moral message or merely a tribute to the artistic quality of Neronian coins. As with Charles I and Otho, or Madame Mère and Agrippina, so also with this anonymous sitter—Bembo or not—and Nero, suspicions are always raised if you know the stories of the emperor or empress concerned. But in having the subject display the coin so prominently as the distinctive emblem of the portrait, Memling was making much bigger points about his own practice and about representational practice more generally. Roman imperial portraits underpinned the idea of modern portraiture. The faces of Roman emperors on coins served to validate the images of living sitters as well as the subjects of the past. Portraiture could be perceived not simply as a binary relationship between artist and subject, but as a triangulation between artist, subject and the image of the emperor—in coin.

But there were other ways in the Renaissance of configuring the idea of the Roman emperor. And one of those—which we have so far only touched on—was as a set, in particular as a set of the Twelve Caesars. Though, as we shall see in the next chapter, this was a much more contested set than we might imagine.