IV

THE TWELVE CAESARS, MORE OR LESS

Silver Caesars

One of the great mysteries in the history of art is the set of twelve grand and exquisitely decorated silver-gilt dishes (or tazze, in Italian), each one with a miniature Roman emperor poised at its centre (Fig. 4.1). Now known as the ‘Aldobrandini Tazze’, after the Italian family who once owned them, they stand half a metre tall, from the foot of the bowl to the head of the emperor, and rank as some of the most impressive pieces of Renaissance silverware anywhere. But their backstory is frustratingly obscure. We do not know exactly when they were made (sometime in the later sixteenth century, but how much earlier than the first documentary record of them in 1599 is debated). We do not know where or by whom (there are some distinctively northern European features in the designs, but—in the absence of any assay marks—suggestions for their origin have ranged from Augsburg to Antwerp). We do not know who commissioned them. Their combined weight in silver, more than thirty-seven kilograms, certainly points to an original owner who was one of the period’s super-rich—but not Car- dinal Pietro Aldobrandini who, as contemporary documents show, did not acquire the full set until the early years of the seventeenth century, although it now takes his name. It is impossible even to be sure what they were for, how they were used or displayed. The idea that they were designed to decorate some lavish banqueting table is a very plausible guess, but no more than that.¹

4.1  ‘Claudius’ from the set of Aldobrandini Tazze made in the late sixteenth century, standing almost half a metre tall from top to base. The emperor, in Roman military dress, his name inscribed near his foot, is detachable and can be screwed into and out of the bowl—which carries intricate scenes from his life. This is the original stem and base (unlike six of the set, which were refitted with more elaborate supports in the nineteenth century).

What is certain is that—even if we cannot pin down the precise date of manufacture—their decoration adds up to the earliest systematic attempt to illustrate Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars to have survived. This is not like individual, exquisite manuscript illustration, which goes back earlier. Here, on the inner surface of each bowl, four scenes selected from the Life of each emperor were engraved in the silver, carefully arranged in the order in which they came in the text (the only exception being that if a triumphal procession was illustrated, celebrating some military victory won by the emperor during his reign, this consistently appeared as the finale, even if that disrupted the chronology²). It is almost as if the silver emperors, screwed into the centre of the bowl, with the name of each—from Suetonius’s Julius Caesar to his Domitian—inscribed at their feet, look down to survey their life story beneath them.

The imperial figures themselves appear relatively conventional, almost a little bland (although a look at their faces in profile makes it instantly clear that they were based on portraits on coins). But the narrative scenes on the bowls are highly distinctive, minutely crafted and packed with detail. They include some episodes that remain modern favourites, almost the emblems of the emperor concerned. Nero, for example, is pictured ‘fiddling while Rome burns’: that is, he is shown playing his lyre in a tower overlooking the city, while flames blaze all around him and the citizens are escaping with their prized possessions (Fig. 4.2a). But others point to different priorities among Renaissance artists and viewers, illustrating parts of Suetonius’s narrative that modern readers tend to pass over. Several of those bizarre omens of future imperial power that few of us now take seriously here get star billing. The first scene on Galba’s bowl shows an eagle snatching away the entrails from a sacrifice being conducted by the future emperor’s grandfather: ‘it meant’, as Suetonius put it, ‘that supreme power, even if late coming, was predicted for his family’ (Fig. 4.2b).³ Overall, the view of the imperial regime that the scenes present is markedly positive, not to say triumphalist. Military victory, in particular, is celebrated. There are no fewer than nine scenes of triumphal processions or their equivalent (Fig. 4.2c), while, despite Suetonius’s interest in the deaths of his subjects, there is only one death scene in silver. That is the brave suicide of Otho in 69 CE, who is pictured reclining on an elegant couch as he stabs himself in the chest (Fig. 4.2d).

Whoever made these dishes (and several artists must have been involved), the overall designer had certainly read Suetonius with care, and captured all kinds of tiny detail: from the birds that were said to have been scattered over Nero during his victory parade to the elephants with torches that were a feature of Julius Caesar’s.⁴ But there were other sources too. Two scenes, featuring the port at Ostia (a project of the emperor Claudius) and the Circus Maximus (where Domitian presented lavish shows), are close copies of prints, reconstructing both monuments, by the sixteenth-century antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (Fig. 4.2e). It is almost certain that Roman coins—or, more likely, a printed compendium of coin designs or even an edition of Suetonius which used relevant coins as illustrations—lay behind Ligorio’s reconstructions.⁵ These drew not on the heads, but on the images of the ‘tails’, which often featured some of the buildings of the city of Rome, as well as its costumes and rituals. A striking case of a similar borrowing is the image on the tazza of Nero which shows the emperor giving a musical recital on stage: the emperor’s pose is taken wholesale from the ‘tails’ of one of his coins, which shows the god Apollo, or—as some believed—Nero himself, playing his lyre (Fig. 4.2f).⁶ Those miniature designs once again were providing a template for re-imagining the Roman world.

4.2  Scenes from the bowls of the Aldobrandini Tazze:

(a) Nero ‘fiddling while Rome burns’

(b) Omens of Galba’s rise to power

(c) The triumph of Julius Caesar, showing the elephants mentioned by Suetonius

(d) The suicide of Otho

(e) Claudius’s harbour at the port of Ostia

(f) Nero playing his lyre in a theatre

This lavish, learned and slightly self-congratulatory line-up in the Aldobrandini Tazze captures one aspect of the Twelve Caesars. We have already encountered a few stand-alone celebrity images of Roman emperors ancient and modern, and there are more to come. But Caesars—whether in marble, metal, paint or paper—are now more often presented to us in groups or as collections. Where we find one imperial figure, another is likely to be not far behind: brother, father, wife, successor or a whole dynasty. These precious silver Caesars sum up one vision of this plurality, carefully ordered and identified, two complete dynasties with the rival candidates of the civil war in between, a fixed and bounded set.

It will come as no surprise to discover that the Suetonian Twelve on this model have sometimes stood as visual symbols of the very principles of classification, representing the systematic ordering of knowledge itself. We shall take a careful look at some of that ordering, and find the Caesars underpinning, for example, that most rigorous of classificatory schemes, namely the library catalogue. But much of this chapter will focus on the other side of modern collections of Roman rulers, whether the canonical twelve or slightly more expansive versions: that is, on their disorder, their subversive variants, their losses, incompleteness, misidentifications, rearrangements and frustrations. We shall be looking at collections of emperors as ‘works in progress’, and at the Twelve Caesars as a paradigm that has always been pointedly resisted as much as it has been followed, a focus of debate and uncertainty as much as an artistic rulebook or straitjacket. That will turn out to be the case even for the Aldobrandini Tazze, in a very unexpected way.

The Perfect Set?

As objects of art the Twelve Caesars were a Renaissance invention.⁷ A modern tribute to Suetonius’s Lives, from Julius Caesar to Domitian, and an attempt to visualise the heroes and antiheroes of that literary text in material form, they also represented a classicising variant on some of those other canonical groups of historical figures who were repeatedly re-imagined in early modern art—such as the Twelve Apostles or the Nine Worthies (who were made up of Julius Caesar, with Alexander the Great and the mythical Trojan hero Hector, alongside three Jewish and three Christian characters to match). They provided a template for modern monarchs too, who had their dynasties squeezed into runs of twelve to mirror the Suetonian Twelve. This was never more extravagantly presented than in the ‘Portico of the Emperors’, part of the stage set designed by Rubens for the triumphal entrance into Antwerp of the Habsburg Prince Ferdinand in 1635: it showcased twelve larger than life-size, gilded statues of the Habsburg monarchs from Rudolf I to Ferdinand II, as the new Twelve Caesars.⁸

After tentative beginnings in the sculpture of the mid-fifteenth century, by the mid-sixteenth portrait groups of the Roman imperial dozen had become a distinctive feature of European (and later American) décor, from the grandest to the relatively modest, and in almost every conceivable medium.⁹ From time to time, artists and patrons enjoyed incorporating original sculptures, restored and reworked to fit, in their line-ups of marble busts.¹⁰ But the majority of these images were entirely modern works, albeit based directly or indirectly on ancient prototypes, and they were still being produced well into the twentieth century. They were also ubiquitous. Despite the occasional scholarly blind spot (one of the most thorough cataloguers of the Twelve Caesars recently went so far as to claim that there were no such sets—in stone at least—in England¹¹), there was no country in the West that they did not invade, even if they came later to some than to others.

They certainly appealed to the taste of the very rich. There was hardly an aristocratic residence in Renaissance Rome without at least one complete set of busts of the Caesars. The Villa Borghese currently has two on show (Fig. 4.3). One is a seventeenth-century set in porphyry and alabaster giving its name to the ‘Room of the Emperors’, the other was carved in the late sixteenth century by Giovanni Battista Della Porta, whose family workshops were responsible for many of the imperial faces in Rome around that period (including two more groups of the Twelve in the Palazzo Farnese, one of which—in its own ‘Room of the Emperors’—was accompanied by copies of Titian’s painted series of the Caesars from Mantua).¹² They found their place, as collectibles or precious curiosities, in the cabinets and treasuries of statesmen, cardinals and kings. A neat row of twelve small plaques carrying imperial heads is shown fixed to the wall behind an array of works of art, stuffed birds, flowers, globes and assorted pets, in paintings of the private gallery of a leading Flemish politician in Brussels in the 1620s (Fig. 4.4).¹³ And Rudolf II, Holy Roman emperor at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rivalled the patron of the Aldobrandini Tazze in having two sets of the Twelve Caesars in silver (one apparently freestanding busts, the other relief plaques) in his castle outside Prague; in this case, though carefully itemised in an early seventeenth-century inventory, they have long since been lost, most likely recycled or melted down.¹⁴ In the open air, they lined the carefully designed ‘natural’ allées and walkways in ornamental gardens. One useful reminder that more recent fortunes too have been ploughed into emperors is found at Anglesey Abbey, a large country house in the east of England. Here, in the early 1950s, Lord Fairhaven, whose wealth derived from a lucky combination of an American industrial inheritance and success in British horse breeding, constructed an ‘Emperors’ Walk’—with a collection of twelve eighteenth-century Caesars he had bought on the antiques market, strikingly set off against the trees.¹⁵

4.3  Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s sixteenth-century set of busts of Twelve Caesars in the Villa Borghese in Rome, placed high on the walls of the grandest reception room: they make up the canonical set from Julius Caesar to Domitian.

4.4  Hieronymus Francken and Jan Brueghel the Elder commemorated the visit to a private collection in Brussels of the Habsburg governors of the Southern Netherlands (Archdukes Albert and Isabella) in the 1620s. The panel, over a metre wide, depicts the variety of the contents of this ‘cabinet’: sculpture, paintings, seashells, a stuffed bird—and a set of plaques of the Twelve Caesars on the back wall.

Such collections were not, however, merely the treasures of aristocrats or the aspirational; they extended into less elite homes and less elite media too. Any number of sets of Twelve Caesars in etchings and engraving were produced in the 1500s and 1600s, to end up in libraries or hanging on the walls of more modest residences: emperors in close-up, head and shoulders, full-length, or on horseback, and often accompanied by brief biographies, or miniature scenes illustrating key moments in their lives. The introduction to a collection of prints of imperial heads, published in 1559 with accompanying text by Jacopo Strada, discusses the function of such images and justifies the production of yet another set. It stresses their use as wall display, singling out the decoration of ‘dining rooms’ (triclinia in the original Latin text), and explains the particularly large size of this edition: this was a gesture to visual frailty, and to ensure that even the elderly and those with poor sight should be able to appreciate the imperial faces.¹⁶ Other emperors found their way into different media. In mid-sixteenth-century France, someone with a little more money to spare owned a tiny casket decorated with enamel roundels that had borrowed some of its distinctive imperial portraits from Marcantonio Raimondi’s series of prints of emperors (Figs 3.7n; 4.8), completed by two almost absurdly chubby putti clutching skulls underneath the slogan ‘Memento mori, dico’ (Remember you must die, I say). ‘These emperors are dead and gone, to serve now as mere decoration,’ must have been part of the message (Fig. 4.5).¹⁷

4.5  This tiny metal casket (only seventeen centimetres in length), made c. 1545, carries enamel images of the Caesars, some based on the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi (with some later replacements). Eight single images fit into the long sides, with ‘doubles’ (two facing heads within one wreath) at either end to make up Twelve.

4.6  A nineteenth-century mass-produced bronze medallion of Caligula, ten centimetres across, with two holes for nailing it to a wall or furniture. Very likely it was originally part of a set of Twelve, whether to be acquired piecemeal or all together.

A bourgeois market was certainly one target in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for many series of small mass-produced imperial portrait plaques in metal or ceramic, sometimes featuring the canonical Twelve (Fig. 4.6). Josiah Wedgwood, one of the most successful English pottery manufacturers of the 1700s, was quite explicit about his aim of making available high culture to the ‘Middling Class of People’. His sets of small collectible roundels featuring the heads of Roman emperors, and their wives, alongside Greek heroes, various kings and queens and (with rather less popular appeal) popes no doubt did just that, as well as adding to the Wedgwood fortune.¹⁸

There was pleasure to be had, and money to be made, from sets of the Twelve Caesars. But it is important not to forget—as it can be easy to do when we see these faces lined up against museum and gallery walls—that there were disappointments and dissatisfactions too, failures as well as successes. One particularly unfortunate mid-eighteenth-century experiment in waxwork is, to our eyes at least, a strangely unattractive ‘mistake’ (Fig. 4.7).¹⁹ But things could go wrong even in the most standard media and even for those with plenty of resources behind them. We can all sympathise with the man commissioning a set of Twelve Caesars to decorate an English country house in the 1670s, who discovered that the first consignment to arrive from Florence had the wrong features on the wrong emperors. Complaining of the sculptors, he wrote, ‘I find fault with them that they have ignorantly planted beards upon those chinns which never wore any’; so, he lent them some of his own coins to help them get the appearance right.²⁰

4.7  Four small wax relief panels of emperors (within the frame they are only fourteen centimetres high), from what is now a series of ten: Titus has probably been recently lost; Caligula may very likely never have been made (or it went missing very early). Here: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius and a quizzical Claudius.

One hallmark of these sets of Caesars, like the Aldobrandini Tazze, was the sense of completion they implied. That was signalled by the numbers, I to XII, often printed or inscribed next to the imperial faces on paper or plaques, and sometimes even on more prestige painting and sculpture. These made an obvious incentive, for those who had not acquired the complete set all at once, to fill the gaps (and, of course, it was from the principle of ‘filling the gap’, or of getting the buyers ‘hooked’, that much of Wedgwood’s profit came). But the numbers were also about asserting a sense of order. That was partly in practical terms: they enabled anyone to line emperors up ‘correctly’ even if they could not quite remember whether Otho (VIII) came before or after Vitellius (IX); and, in the case of those imperial chairs (Fig. 1.12), no matter who drew the short straws of Caligula or Nero, they offered a diagram for the seating plan at dinner. There was, however, a bigger point. As one art historian has recently summed it up, numerical cycles of the Caesars ‘seemed to symbolize the encyclopaedic knowledge of collectors’; they reflected ‘a complete well-ordered knowledge of the past’.²¹

There is a hint of that in the painting of the Flemish collector’s gallery (Fig. 4.4): the neat imperial line-up on the rear wall suggests a sense of system and order underlying what we might otherwise mistake for clutter and disorder. But it is taken to its logical extreme in the library of the English collector, antiquarian and politician Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, which he started in the late sixteenth century, and which became one of the most important and valuable collections of books and manuscripts in the country, as well as housing coins and curiosities. Here, bronze busts of the Twelve Caesars were placed on top of the ranks of the shelves in cupboards (or ‘bookpresses’) and provided the system of classification for the contents below. Even now, in the British Library—which was founded in the eighteenth century around the nucleus of the Cotton library, and where most of its contents that escaped a fire in 1731 have been preserved—anyone who wants to consult the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf must order it as ‘Vitellius A xv’ (originally the fifteenth item on the top shelf of the Vitellius press); for the Lindisfarne Gospels, the call number is ‘Nero D iv’. There was no obvious connection in subject matter between the imperial character above and the texts below, but emperors and their images stood, and still stand, for the whole taxonomic system.²² That is reflected too in other libraries across the world, and goes beyond the common practice, with roots in antiquity itself, of using ancient busts to provide appropriate décor for the bookish environment (‘library busts’ as they are still advertised in upmarket sales catalogues). At roughly the same date as Cotton was establishing his own collection, the library at the Villa Medici in Rome was installed, also with imperial busts above the shelves.²³ There is perhaps a faint echo of that tradition in the marble busts of a selection of emperors that even now adorn some areas of New York Public Library: knowledge and libraries still operate under the sign of the Caesars.²⁴

Yet the Cotton system also reveals the ragged edges of its own categories. Its main lines were certainly defined by the succession of Suetonius’s emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian, but two women with imperial connections were also part of the classificatory scheme: Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, one-time partner of Julius Caesar and defeated enemy of Augustus; and the second-century CE Faustina, the reputedly virtuous wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius (but, as with the first-century Agrippinas, there was also a disreputable daughter of the same name, who was the wife of Marcus Aurelius and hard to tell apart from her mother). This pair is often treated as an addition to the main set. So they might have been. One recent attempt to reconstruct the physical layout of the Cotton library, long since destroyed, has the Cleopatra and Faustina section in a subsidiary alcove off the main series of presses, between Augustus and Tiberius.²⁵ It is possible that it was later proprietors or curators of the library who devised these extra sections, and not Cotton himself. But whoever was responsible, it underlines how flexible and porous the canonical category of the Twelve Caesars could be, and just how easy it was to disrupt the standard line-up—in this case with the dissonant characters of one later, virtuous imperial wife (if we have the correct Faustina), and one imperial mistress and victim. It is a flexibility that is found time and again, and it makes the Twelve Caesars a far more dynamic—and interesting—category than it might at first seem. What we call ‘the Twelve Caesars’ are often not quite that at all.

Reinventions, Ragged Edges and Work in Progress

From the very moment that modern artists began to produce images of the Twelve Caesars they were already redefining, adapting and having fun with the category. It is impossible now to pinpoint exactly when and where the first attempt was made to capture Suetonius’s emperors in stone, but there are clear references in Italian accounts and inventories as early as the mid-fifteenth century to sculptors producing, and being paid for, ‘twelve heads’, ‘twelve marble heads of emperors’ or even ‘twelve marble heads taken from medaglie of XII emperors’; and a number of images which seem to fit the description still survive—for the most part marble relief panels, some more or less matching in size and style, depicting coin-like profile portraits of imperial characters. All kinds of puzzles about these remain, and it has proved frustratingly difficult to link the people who might have commissioned the earliest sculptures (Giovanni de’ Medici, the subject of the first modern imperial-style portrait (Fig. 3.20), has been one of the candidates), with the contemporary artists who produced them and with the images themselves. No complete set has been preserved. What is absolutely clear, however, is that these innovative line-ups of ‘twelve emperors’ were not always the same as the canonical Twelve. Within the elite culture of the mid-fifteenth century the phrase ‘Twelve Caesars’ undeniably pointed to the text of Suetonius and ‘his’ emperors, but the sculptors (or their patrons) made their own ‘substitutions’. It is hard otherwise to explain the presence, amongst the surviving panels, of Agrippa, son-in-law and right-hand man of Augustus, and of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, alongside Julius Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Galba and others–in place, it seems, of Caligula, Vitellius or Titus.²⁶

Half a century or so later, the very first series of prints to commemorate the Twelve Caesars allows us to identify more precisely the kind of substitution that was going on. This was that impressive, influential and much replicated set originally produced by Marcantonio Raimondi in 1520—who, in designing it, as we have already seen (Fig. 3.7n), inadvertently confused the titles and coin image of Vespasian with that of his son Titus. A line-up of Twelve Caesars it certainly was. But, even allowing for such errors, it was not quite the Suetonian Twelve. In place of Caligula, inserted in the last slot, as ‘12’ in the numbered sets, was the emperor Trajan (98–117 CE), with his names, titles and standard portrait type derived, like the others in the series (and correctly in this case), from coin heads. Or so Raimondi intended. Ironically, more than one major modern museum would have us imagine that his line-up was actually completed by the emperor Nerva, who ruled briefly between 96 and 98 CE: the uncharismatic, elderly successor of Domitian, and the adoptive father of Trajan. This is because their cataloguers have made exactly the same type of blunder in identifying this final emperor as Raimondi himself made in mixing up his Vespasian and Titus. As is very easy to do with these almost identical imperial names, they have confused the ‘Nerva Traianus’ on the print (that is, as we would call him, ‘Trajan’) with his predecessor, who was just plain ‘Nerva’. These errors in identification, repeated, even by some of the best-qualified experts, across almost half a millennium, must count as another factor in the slipperiness of the category. They also offer a warning about scoffing too loudly at the mistakes of earlier generations: the full versions of emperors’ names, in all their deceptive similarity, have been tripping up the wary as well as the unwary for centuries (Fig. 4.8).²⁷

4.8  Marcantonio Raimondi’s early sixteenth-century engraving of Trajan (emperor 98–117) is now commonly misidentified as his predecessor and adoptive father Nerva (96–98) from the Latin titles around the edge. It is an understandable error. Trajan’s title was (as here) ‘Imp[erator] Caes[ar] Nerva Traianus Aug[ustus] Ger[manicus]’ etc. But ‘Nerva’ is a reference back to Trajan’s father, and does not point to the emperor Nerva himself (whose titles would have been ‘Imp[erator] Caes[ar] Nerva Aug[ustus]’ etc.).

Why these substitutions were made, we can only guess. The usual explanation is that there was a moral agenda underlying them, with the aim of inserting a ‘good’ emperor into the Twelve in place of a ‘bad’ one, in order to make the set a more convincing role model: hence Trajan, sometimes dubbed optimus princeps (the best emperor), ousted the reputedly monstrous Caligula. There is no doubt something in this, even if it does not entirely explain, for example, the apparent omission of Titus from those early marble profiles (though a ‘golden boy’ in the biographical tradition, he perhaps did not have sufficient popular recognition); nor does it explain why Raimondi rejected Caligula but apparently had no problems about including the equally appalling Domitian and Nero.

The bigger point, however, is that the canonical Twelve thrived on difference, as well as on standardisation. It is only over the last century or so, when the academic straitjacket had tightened, that the habit of ringing the changes has ceased. It was not only Titian who stopped short of Twelve, ending with Titus and omitting Domitian in the Caesars he painted for Mantua in the 1530s. To judge from an early inventory of the collection, the unfortunate waxwork experiment (Fig. 4.7) was originally a truncated set which left out Caligula.²⁸ Even more radical variations on the theme were possible. In 1594, the Fugger family of Antwerp erected a ‘pop-up colonnade’ (porticus temporaria) of the Twelve Caesars as part of the celebrations to welcome yet another of the junior Habsburgs (in this case Rudolf II’s younger brother). It was on a more modest scale than Rubens’s later ostentation in the ‘Portico of the Emperors’, but offered a more varied mix of characters. The design featured the four ‘best’ Roman emperors, in images five metres high: Augustus and Titus (included this time, as the conqueror of Jerusalem), plus Trajan and Antoninus Pius; but these were followed by four Byzantine emperors and, tactfully, four Habsburgs to make up the dozen.²⁹

In short, like many such categories, which at first sight appear rigidly uniform, the ‘Twelve Caesars’ was one to be adapted, reconstructed, re-invented and modernised around the symbol of that canonical number. It was as much a dialogue with, as a precise attempt to replicate, the Suetonian Twelve. Those who looked with care would find not simply more of the same, but new questions always being raised about the category itself. Particular substitutions (a ‘good’ emperor for a ‘bad’) or curtailments (eleven rather than twelve) always promised, or threatened, to add new meaning to the set.

That flexibility, or sometimes disorder, was given an extra edge by the process of collecting itself. To be sure, some of those matching marble series of the Twelve Caesars in palaces and gardens were produced as a single commission or acquired as a one-off purchase. Indeed, almost all imperial sets, when we look at them now in museum cabinets and on gallery shelves, are liable in retrospect to appear frozen and finished, as if that is how they had always been intended. But collections—of Caesars as much as of anything else—were often works in progress. It was not only those without the financial resources, such as Wedgwood’s more modest clients, who acquired their emperors piecemeal. The ‘fun of the chase’ has often been an important driver here. Many of even the richest collectors enjoyed the incremental pleasures of constructing the set, and of gradually filling the gaps (as well as creating new ones, if it looked as if the chase might end prematurely).

4.9  Hendrick Goltzius’s Vitellius (roughly seventy by fifty centimetres) from the series commissioned in the early seventeenth century probably by Maurits, Prince of Orange. Goltzius died at the beginning of 1617, which would make this implausible, ‘off-the-shoulder’, emperor the first in the series. But the timings, the commission and even the artists are not well documented.

That is signalled in an intriguing way in Fulvio’s Illustrium imagines (Fig. 3.7h and i), where occasionally a blank roundel takes the place of a portrait. In part, this is a pledge of authenticity (‘in the absence of a reliable image of this person, I will merely indicate a blank’); but these empty spaces were also a reminder that there was always more to add to a collection (even in print), always a specimen that you did not have.³⁰ There were other ingenious ways of insisting on variety. One Netherlandish prince in the early seventeenth century, for example, commissioned a set of the Twelve Caesars—but each one from a different artist. The finished paintings arrived over a period of years between 1618 and 1625, depending on the speed of the painters. They ranged from a chillingly stern Julius Caesar by Rubens to an almost absurdly semi-clad Vitellius and an innocently dreamy Otho by rather lesser talents (Fig. 4.9).³¹

4.10  This diminutive eighteenth-century figure (about twenty-six centimetres high including the base), in precious and semi-precious stones, gold and enamel, represents the emperor Titus. Carved separately, the different parts (arms, faces, etc.) were then bound together with very strong glue!

It is clear that the aims of some collectors, even if they had begun modestly enough with a desire for just the first Twelve, were constantly extendable. The German princess who was so proud of her ancient coins had surely not started out with the ambition of acquiring a specimen for each ruler from Julius Caesar to Heraclius; her aims grew with her collection. Others found their ambitions thwarted or cut off in midstream. Archives from the early eighteenth century allow us to track the gradual acquisition by Augustus ‘the Strong’, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, of a miniature, and frankly rather gaudy, set of emperors in semi-precious stones: a tiny Domitian was the first he bought, followed by a matching Titus in the following year, and a Vespasian in early 1731 (so far working backwards through the Flavian dynasty); but a few months later a Julius Caesar was added (Fig. 4.10). And that is where this set stopped in its tracks. All kinds of factors may have been at work, from a capricious change of heart on the part of the elector to one on the part of the artist. That said, the chances are that had Augustus ‘the Strong’ lived a few years beyond early 1733, we would now be looking at a set of the Twelve Caesars, not Four.³² In other cases, collections developed and changed over time through accidental loss, theft, breakages and rearrangement. The missing Caligula among those unfortunate waxworks may have been just that: missing, lost somehow or removed before the early inventory was taken. Even the lavish Twelve Caesars in the grandest salone of the Villa Borghese in Rome were soon rearranged: the same Caesars, but disaggregated, repositioned and no longer in the ‘correct’ chronological, Suetonian order.³³

4.11  An eighteenth-century view of the Gallery at Herrenhausen Castle in Hanover, by Joost van Sasse. Neither those who parade themselves fashionably, nor the dogs, pay much attention to the busts lining the walls.

This idea of a work in progress, with all its ragged edges and accidents, is nicely summed up in the history of one major collection on display in the gallery of Herrenhausen Castle in Hanover, now comprising eleven bronze portraits of emperors (the Suetonian Twelve, without Julius Caesar and Domitian, but including Septimius Severus), as well as a Republican ‘Scipio’ and an Egyptian king ‘Ptolemy’. Acquired in 1715 by George I—elector of Hanover, as well as king of Great Britain and Ireland—from the property of Louis XIV at his death, they were not originally a single, homogeneous collection. To judge from the slightly different sizes and detailing, they had been put together from three separate early modern sets, only to be passed off as original Roman works that had been dragged out of the Tiber (J. J. Winckelmann, among others, soon poured even colder water on any such idea). In 1715, they had numbered twenty-six pieces, but these were taken back to France by Napoleon in 1803 and only fourteen ever returned, the others never surfacing since. The loss of Domitian, stolen in 1982, reduced the number again (Otho too had been stolen a few years earlier, but had luckily been found under a bush in the nearby gardens and reinstalled); and just to add an extra element to the confusion, after a cleaning programme in 1984, the heads of Galba and Vespasian were put back onto each other’s (named) plinths, adding a layer of glaring mistaken ‘identities’. At first glance, this is not far from being a set of the canonical Twelve, but on closer inspection it is a very long way off indeed (Fig. 4.11).³⁴

Emperors’ New Clothes, from Rome to Oxford

A much more ambitious, and an even more complicated, collection of imperial heads still occupies one of the main rooms of the New Wing (the Palazzo Nuovo) of the Capitoline Museums in Rome. This is the ‘Room of the Emperors’, whose sixty-seven busts, from Julius Caesar to Honorius (393–423 CE), plus a selection of their wives, make it now the largest systematic collection of Roman emperors in marble anywhere in the world (Fig. 4.12). Standing on two rows of shelves, they are arranged around the room in precise chronological order, except for a couple of pieces which stand separately on pedestals and the seated figure in the centre: the so-called ‘Agrippina’, which was the model for Canova’s Madame Mére, though she has more recently changed her identity. The distinctively later style of this statue is now thought to make it impossible that she was either of the first-century imperial ladies by the name of Agrippina; but whether she is really Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine (306–37 CE), as she has come to be called, is a matter of debate (Fig. 1.22).

The whole range of imperial portrait types here, almost literally, rub shoulders—from some bona fide ancient pieces (rightly or wrongly identified as imperial characters), through heads that have been artfully ‘restored’ into an emperor or imperial lady, hybrids of all types (including some genuine ancient faces inserted into flamboyant modern multicoloured busts), to any number of modern ‘versions’, ‘replicas’ or ‘fakes’.³⁵ It is as mixed—and as typical—a collection of Roman emperors as you now could imagine. When they were first installed, however, the belief (or hope) was that all these heads were authentically ancient.

4.12  The ‘Room of the Emperors’ in the Capitoline Museums, as it was arranged in the 1890s, with the so-called ‘Agrippina’ centre-stage. The profusion of images tends to mask the differences in scale: see, for example, on the left of the door (upper shelf) the large Titus, next to the much smaller female head (conventionally identified as Titus’s daughter Julia).

That was in the 1730s, when the Palazzo Nuovo was being redesigned to become what was in effect the first public museum in Europe. The palazzi on the Capitoline hill (including the older wing that was the Palazzo dei Conservatori) had certainly long contained some famous antiquities and works of art, and there were any number of other papal or private collections, which allowed access to the favoured few. But one of the biggest operators in Rome of the period—Alessandro Gregorio Capponi—converted the more recent wing (the Palazzo Nuovo) into a new civic museum, which afforded ‘open access to the curiosity of foreigners and dilettantes and greater ease to youths studying the liberal arts’. This involved evicting the local Department of Agriculture, among other guilds and agencies, from the premises and extracting money from the pope, both to buy up much of Cardinal Albani’s large collection of ancient statues as the nucleus of the new museum and to convert the building into a series of galleries.³⁶

In this design, two rooms out of seven on the first floor—the main display area—were earmarked for the faces of men and women of classical antiquity. Adjoining the Room of the Emperors was (and still is) the ‘Room of the Philosophers’: a collection of almost a hundred marble ‘portraits’ of ancient thinkers and writers—‘philosophers’ very broadly defined—from Homer to Cicero, Pythagoras to Plato. In these rooms, Capponi went far beyond a collection of the Twelve Caesars that were, in whatever subtle variations, one of the standard fixtures in the neighbouring aristocratic residences, and far beyond any eclectic line-up of library busts of literary characters. In the case of the emperors, he was aiming for a systematic, total display of these imperial faces that was not unknown in collections of coins, but had never before been attempted on this scale in marble.

For two hundred years or so, the Room of the Emperors was taken to be a highlight of the museum. Early catalogues and guidebooks (unlike some of the more fainthearted modern versions) went through each head in turn, sometimes at enormous length. One compendium devoted over three hundred pages to the contents of the room, with an illustration of each sculpture, and a long description combining the archaeological details and assorted observations by Winckelmann with an historical pen-portrait of each of the men and women represented.³⁷ Visitors varied in their reactions, from those who delighted in tracing the stylistic development in portraiture or making comparisons with modern leaders (according to one American observer, Trajan shared his instant recognisability with ‘our own Washington’) to those who rightly spotted the blurring of the lines between sculpture and historical character (were you supposed to be reflecting on the history of art or on the history of imperial power?). Not all were as clued-up about Roman rulers and their family trees as they tried to pretend. At least one in their memoirs confidently misidentified the ‘Agrippina’ in the centre of the room as the mother of the prince Germanicus—when it did not take much knowledge of ancient history to know that she was either his wife (Agrippina the Elder) or his daughter (Agrippina the Younger), certainly not his mother.³⁸

But whatever their reactions or expertise, it is clear that visitors on their tour of the museum did not usually skip the Room of the Emperors–unlike now, when it is regularly by-passed entirely or given a very hasty visit indeed. It must count as a nightmare come true for anyone with even a slight distaste for rows of marble busts, especially when it is combined with the next-door Room of the Philosophers (adding up to a grand total of almost two hundred severed heads between them, on shelf after shelf). Its modern claim to fame rests much more on its place in the history of museum display: an early eighteenth-century installation frozen in time, almost an exhibit of itself. As one historian of classical archaeology has recently put it, the Room of the Emperors, at the heart of the Capitoline Museums, represents a museological ‘time-capsule’, as if it were unchanged over the centuries.³⁹

Unchanged it definitely is not. Whatever illusion we might cherish of this immutable collection of imperial faces that have come down to us directly from the 1730s, the truth is that the Room of the Emperors has been in flux—its contents debated, discarded and rearranged—ever since the museum’s foundation. At the very beginning, there were disagreements about what exactly its boundaries should be, as well as problems in ensuring the presence of a complete set. As Capponi’s diaries of the time mention, a bust of Julius Caesar’s main adversary, Pompey the Great, who was killed in Egypt in 48 BCE, was one of the first pieces to be installed, before being almost instantly removed—on expert advice and on the obvious grounds that whatever his ambitions might have been, Pompey was even less of an ‘emperor’ than Julius Caesar. Meanwhile Cardinal Albani did not always prove as cooperative in parting with his sculptures as Capponi hoped. The line-up of the Suetonian Twelve Caesars, a necessary nucleus of the Room, threatened to be left incomplete at the start when Albani tried to keep hold of his ‘Claudius’, until Capponi came up with more money.⁴⁰

The contours of the collection have never actually been fixed. Over almost two hundred years, as old catalogues and guidebooks show, the number of portraits has gone up and down, and the selection of characters has constantly been adjusted. Currently sixty-seven when all are present (a few are commonly ‘on leave’, loaned out to temporary exhibitions), they make a slimmer and less cramped display than in the past. There were eighty-four on display in 1736, trimmed down to seventy-seven by 1750 (one of four duplicate Hadrians had been shed, as well as one of three Caracallas and two Lucius Veruses, plus a little further ‘weeding’). The seventy-six listed in 1843 were up to eighty-three ten years later, to eighty-four in 1904, and back to eighty-three by 1912. A few of these differences may perhaps be put down to miscounting or omissions on the part of inattentive compilers, but there are some clear hints that changing criteria are at play, whether that is the principle, increasingly strongly applied, of one statue per person, or other questions of who belongs where or at what point the series should end. Julian, who ruled from 361 to 363 CE (and will appear again in Chapter 6), was for many years the latest ruler on show, though at some point a different and very dubious portrait of ‘Julian’ was substituted for the original one, and in the early nineteenth century a head optimistically identified as the obscure Magnus Decentius (who ruled in the early 350s) usurped the final place, despite reigning before Julian. Decentius is still there (though now identified as Honorius, or alternatively as the slightly earlier Valens), though Julian has been transferred next door to the Room of the Philosophers, presumably on the basis of his surviving writing, which includes some decidedly flamboyant theology. Other portraits have fallen victim to modern scepticism and have either been removed entirely or else anonymised. The original ‘Julius Caesar’ is still in place, but now demoted to the rank of an ‘unknown Roman’, or busto maschile—so making an underwhelming start to the whole imperial series.⁴¹

4.13  The centrepiece in the Room of the Emperors, on which the surrounding rulers gaze, has changed over the centuries. Before ‘Agrippina’ (Fig. 1.22), there were, in order, (a) the grossly over-life-size Baby Hercules (two metres); (b) a sculpture once identified as Hadrian’s lover Antinoos (almost two metres); (c) the so-called Capitoline Venus (again just under two metres).

It is, however, in the piece of freestanding sculpture, usually placed in the middle of the room—as if the object of the gaze of these assembled emperors and their families—that we find the most drastic changes over time. The ‘Agrippina’ has been the centrepiece of the display for more than two hundred years. But the first focal point, installed in the room even before the emperors themselves, was an outsized baby Hercules in shiny dark green basalt that had been found on the site of a large set of third-century CE baths in Rome (the joke of this gross statue was presumably that it depicted a semi-divine toddler on a colossal scale, more than two metres tall).⁴² This was upstaged in 1744, when a statue, found at the emperor Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, and then believed to represent Antinoos, Hadrian’s lover, was given the central position.⁴³ This soon gave way to the famous Capitoline Venus, which was lodged there in pride of place among the imperial characters immediately after its presentation to the museum in 1752. It was some time after this precious Venus had been taken to Paris by Napoleon in 1797 (to be returned to Rome only in 1816) that the ‘Agrippina’ was transferred to the Room of the Emperors (Fig. 4.13).⁴⁴

4.14  ‘They are crowned never but with crowns of snow,’ as Max Beerbohm described them in the early twentieth century. The Oxford ‘emperors’ outside the Sheldonian Theatre, whose original versions go back to the seventeenth century, are—emperors or not—sometimes really crowned with snow.

These shifting arrangements have rarely been noticed and their implications never spelled out. It is one thing to have the emperors and empresses gazing at the staid figure of an ‘Agrippina’ or even at the vast version of baby Hercules. It was quite another to make it appear that the whole object of their attention was Hadrian’s young boyfriend, scantily clad, or what was then one of the most famous nudes in Europe—the Capitoline Venus. It is an important reminder that line-ups of Caesars were not always as passive as we often assume. Not much was required to animate these figures, and to make them seem to engage actively with their setting.

The Caesars could even be imagined as exemplary participants in the human affairs going on around them, or occasionally be turned into wry, witty observers of contemporary life. So, for example, in the sixteenth-century theatre in the tiny Italian town of Sabbioneta, busts of Augustus and Trajan set into the wall of the upper gallery—along with a variety of pagan gods and goddesses, plus a figure of Alexander the Great—served partly to signal the ancient antecedents of this radically new, classicising experiment in theatre design. (The famous Renaissance slogan ‘Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet’ (How great Rome was, its very ruins show) is still plastered across the outside of the building for those who did not get the point.) But the emperors, with their eyes directed firmly to the stage, also acted as model members of the audience, forever locked in appreciation of the performance.⁴⁵

Rather more light-hearted was the circle of eight emperors placed around the seventeenth-century fountain at Bolsover Castle, in northern England. A century before the similar arrangement with the Capitoline Venus in Rome, these imperial figures provided the background to—and were the voyeurs of—a naked figure of Venus, which was the fountain’s centrepiece. Even more animated, and almost brought to life as characters in one of the funniest comic novellas of the early twentieth century, is the series of so-called ‘Roman emperors’, beloved of tourist guides, that still stand outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford; un-classical in style though they are, they are the most famous open-air line-up of Caesars in Britain (Fig. 4.14).

The Sheldonian, designed by Christopher Wren in the 1660s, is the main centre of University ceremonial (not a theatre in the ‘dramatic’ sense). Of the original fourteen stone emperors that Wren placed around its main facade, one was removed during nearby building works within a few decades, and the others have long since eroded and been replaced, twice, by new versions: first in 1868, and then again in the early 1970s (though at least a couple of the seventeenth-century set can still be found recycled as ornaments in Oxford gardens).⁴⁶ The literary fame of these rather gruff Caesars comes from Max Beerbohm’s novel Zuleika Dobson, first published in 1911, whose young and exotically named heroine arrives among the dreaming spires to stay with her grandfather, who is the head of the fictional, or semi-fictional, Judas College. Not only does Zuleika proceed to fall in love for the first time, but all the male undergraduates (and Oxford was then an almost entirely male university) proceed to fall in love with her: literally all of them, and so badly in love that they end up killing themselves for her, every single one. At the end of the novel, the unworldly dons seem hardly to have noticed that the students are all dead (even though the dining hall is strangely empty); meanwhile on the very last page, Zuleika is found making inquiries about how best to get to Cambridge (where it is not hard to guess what will happen). It is a clever satire both on the dangers of women and on the madness of this masculine university world.⁴⁷

Beerbohm re-imagines these emperors, with their prime vantage point in the city centre, as key observers of the tragi-comic events of the novel. From the very beginning, they are more aware than the flesh-and-blood characters of the trouble that lies in store. Although Zuleika barely gives them a glance as she makes her way to Judas College with her grandfather (‘the inanimate had little charm for her’), the emperors themselves—as one old don notices—break out into a sweat as they watch her, ‘great beads of perspiration glistening on their brows’. ‘They at least’, Beerbohm continues, ‘foresaw the peril that was overhanging Oxford and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be remembered to their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently of them.’ This prompts him to some more general musing on the morality and fate of these imperial autocrats. ‘In their lives,’ he goes on, ‘we know they were infamous, some of them.’ But in Oxford they have been given their punishment: ‘exposed eternally and inexorably to heat and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles.… To these emperors, for whom none weeps, time will give no surcease. Surely, it is a sign of some grace in them that they did not rejoice, this bright afternoon, in the evil that was to befall the city of their penance.’⁴⁸

There is, however, an even bigger joke here. The truth is that there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that Christopher Wren, or his sculptor William Byrd, designed these figures to represent Caesars. They are now almost universally interpreted as such (almost: the sculptor who made the new 1970s version is reported as saying that ‘they were nothing so elevated … they merely illustrated different kinds of beards’⁴⁹). But, so far as I have been able to discover, Beerbohm was the first to refer to them in print as ‘Roman emperors’, even if the oral tradition may go back further. Their appearance suggests that they were more likely intended originally to represent a group of ‘worthies’ or figured boundary markers (‘herms’), with some very remote classical inspiration. They are, in other words, one of the most extreme cases of the porosity of the category of emperor, whether twelve or not, that you could find: here, as occasionally elsewhere, the ingenuity, wit and wishful thinking of later writers and viewers have succeeded in converting a series of quite other, innocuous figures into a line-up of Roman rulers, with all the cultural baggage that goes with them. Beerbohm’s double bluff is that (even though the Apostles do not normally come in groups of thirteen or fourteen) the authorial voice of the novelist was no closer than the ‘ignorant’ speculation of those American visitors to the original intention of the sculptor.

Silver Caesars Rearranged

No such big questions of identity hang over the Caesars of the Aldobrandini Tazze. Each emperor carries his name in an original inscription near his feet, and they preside over scenes of their glorious deeds drawn directly from Suetonius’s Lives. But even with this apparently canonical set, there is a lot more disruption and constructive re-identification than I have so far acknowledged. The Aldobrandini Tazze have long undermined their own status as the perfect set of Caesars. In some ways, they are as striking an example of the fluidity of the category as the ‘emperors’ of Oxford.

For a start, the set of twelve is no longer a set, but is dispersed in ones and twos across the world, in museums and private collections from London to Lisbon and Los Angeles. How exactly the separation happened remains a mystery, though the outlines of the story are clear enough.⁵⁰ Their origins look rather like another case of a work in progress (the earliest written reference to them is as a group of six only, on sale in 1599). But for two and a half centuries—from 1603, when they were documented in the collection of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, until 1861, when they were all sold together at auction in London—they formed a complete collection of the Suetonian Twelve, passing between different owners, from Italy to England. Soon afterwards, they went their very different ways. A singleton was sold in Hamburg in 1882, the Rothschild family in Paris are recorded as owning seven, six and two in decreasing numbers between 1882 and 1912, and in 1893 at another London auction six of the tazze which had been in the possession of the dealer and collector Frederic Spitzer were sold in separate lots—and the disaggregation has continued, along with some dramatic interventions on some of the pieces. Spitzer, for example, had the six that he owned refitted with much more elaborate feet, presumably to enhance their value and selling appeal. But he did not go so far as whoever decided to detach both the foot and the imperial figure from the bowl representing the life of Titus (the figures conveniently ‘screw in’ and ‘screw out’) and to re-invent it as a ‘rosewater dish’ by Benvenuto Cellini—as it was sold at auction in 1914.

Those kinds of alteration are, however, only one part of the fluidity of the imperial imagery on the tazze, as I first discovered in 2010 when I went to have a closer look at the one that had ended up (via the Spitzer sale) in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This was supposed to be the figure of Domitian with scenes from his life on the bowl: the emperor’s wife travelling to meet him in Germany, his campaigns against the Germans, his triumphal procession celebrating his conquest of them and finally his receipt of their formal submission.⁵¹ The figure itself, with the name inscribed, was exactly as advertised. But it was soon clear that there was something very wrong indeed with the scenes on the bowl. The clearest warning came with the depiction of the triumphal procession. For, unusually, the triumphal chariot in which the general travelled was empty, and he had apparently dismounted to kneel in front of another figure seated alongside the processional route. This had nothing to do with Suetonius’s account of Domitian’s victory parade, but exactly matches what he has to say about the triumph over the Germans celebrated by Tiberius, while Augustus was still on the throne: ‘before he turned to drive up onto the Capitoline hill, he got down from the chariot and dropped to his knees in front of his father [Augustus] who was presiding over the ceremony’.⁵² Roman readers would have taken this as a sign of Tiberius’s deference; for me it was a clear hint that the bowl had been wrongly identified and was attached to the wrong emperor (Fig. 4.15a).

So it turned out. The scene identified as Domitian’s wife riding to join him in Germany could not possibly be that. Nothing of the sort features in Suetonius’s Life—and, anyway, why is the woman apparently on fire? It must instead be the story of Tiberius’s lucky escape when as a baby, during the civil wars following Julius Caesar’s assassination, he was on the run with his mother Livia, and a forest fire nearly engulfed their whole party (Fig. 4.15b). Likewise, what was dubbed the submission of the Germans to Domitian (puzzlingly accompanied by scenes of collapsing buildings) fits much better with Suetonius’s reference to Tiberius’s generosity to the cities of the eastern empire after a severe earthquake. And the battle between Romans and some distinctively clad sixteenth-century pike-men featured on the remaining scene could equally well depict Tiberius’s campaigns in Germany as Domitian’s. It took only a careful look, and a text of Suetonius, to see that the wrong emperor was on the wrong bowl.⁵³

This obviously raised other questions. If the Domitian bowl really illustrated scenes from the Life of Tiberius, where did that leave the so-called ‘Tiberius’ bowl that was in Lisbon, wrongly attached, as had long been recognised, to the figure of Galba? This turned out to be the bowl of Caligula (thanks to some extraordinary wishful thinking, the scene of Caligula prancing on horseback across a bridge of boats, for example, had been interpreted as Tiberius going into retirement on the island of Capri) (Fig. 4.15c). To square the circle, the so-called ‘Caligula’ bowl in Minneapolis proved to be that of the elusive Domitian, who had also fallen victim to some over-optimistic misidentifications (the scene of the burning of the Capitol in Rome during the civil war of 68–69, complete with unmistakable flames, had rather desperately been read as the outbreak of popular disturbances on the death of Caligula’s father Germanicus).⁵⁴ But that was only the start: as recent work on the tazze has shown, there have been any number of misreadings of the scenes, and—despite the clear labelling—emperors have migrated from bowl to bowl. The Domitian bowl in Minneapolis is actually topped by the figure of Augustus, while the Augustus bowl is combined with the figure of Nero, serving as the much-loved table decoration of a private collector in Los Angeles. And so on. Only two, Julius Caesar and Claudius, seem to have survived in their original state.

These recombinations have been going on for centuries; the fact that they are only possible when more than one of the tazze is in the same ownership pushes the mistakes back into the nineteenth century and most likely before. They are partly to be explained by the practical ease with which the pieces come apart. If all twelve emperors were unscrewed to be cleaned, it would take, at the very least, considerable efficiency to ensure they all returned to their correct bowls (after all, even the expert conservators in Hanover managed to return the marble busts of Galba and Vespasian to the wrong plinths). They are also partly to be explained by a maybe increasing unfamiliarity with the text of Suetonius. If the cleaning staff, understandably, did not spot that the scenes chased on bowls failed to match the emperors, then neither did the rich owners and collectors. But overall, whatever the precise reasons, the fluidity of these combinations is a wonderful example of how the canonical set of the Twelve Caesars is almost never quite as canonical as it seems, but almost always in flux, in the process of disaggregation and recombination. Behind those line-ups of marble busts are many unexpected histories such as this.

But there is an added level of pointed irony and thwarted intentions in the story of the imperial figure and bowl that I went to see in the Victoria and Albert Museum. When it first entered the museum in 1927, it actually displayed the figure of Vitellius above what was then taken to be the Domitian bowl. The present combination is the result of an attempt in the 1950s to put some of the emperors back with their right bowls. Three museums, the Victoria and Albert, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Royal Ontario Museum, which each owned one of the tazze, arranged to swap their figures. The figure of Vitellius was sent to the Met to join the Vitellius bowl, Otho, who had stood on the Vitellius bowl, was sent by the Met to the Ontario Museum to be reunited with ‘his’ bowl’, and Ontario’s figure of Domitian came to London. It was a well-meaning example of international collaboration, and the Met and the Royal Ontario Museum each ended up with their tazze correctly composed. The only trouble was that—as the London bowl did not actually belong to Domitian at all—the Victoria and Albert’s tazza remained just as mongrel as ever.⁵⁵ There could be no better symbol of the perils of misidentification stretching back hundreds of years, and of the ways that the desire to order and systematise these sets of Twelve Caesars is so often transcended or thwarted. I very much doubt that Domitian will be leaving the Tiberius bowl any time soon. But who knows?

4.15

(a) The bowl of Tiberius (previously identified as Domitian): Tiberius stands down from his triumphal chariot to honour Augustus

(b) The bowl of Tiberius (previously identified as Domitian): Livia and the baby Tiberius escape through the flames in the Civil Wars

(c) The bowl of Caligula (previously identified as Tiberius): Caligula on his bridge of boats across the Bay of Baiae

Those perils of misidentification will be one theme in the next chapter, which takes a careful look at another major work of sixteenth-century art: Titian’s eleven Caesars, probably the most significant and influential set of modern Caesars of all, which travelled the length of Europe, only to be completely destroyed in a fire in Spain in the eighteenth century. Theirs is a fascinating story of reconstruction, with all the fun of getting down to the detail of just one set of Caesars. How can we recapture what these lost paintings looked like, and what was so special about them? Can we recreate their changing contexts—and meaning? Why did they become the Caesars for centuries in early modern Europe?

But it starts with an unexpected tale of survival.