VI

SATIRE, SUBVERSION AND ASSASSINATION

The Caesars on the Stairs

For those who have little taste for ‘extreme baroque’, the decoration of the ‘King’s Staircase’ at Hampton Court Palace, just outside London, is hard to take (‘florid’ is one of the politer adjectives applied to it).¹ Finished in the early years of the eighteenth century, these paintings were part of a radical makeover of the palace, started by King William and Queen Mary very soon after they seized the throne from Mary’s father in 1688. They were the work of Antonio Verrio, an Italian artist, astute businessman and survivor, who managed to win major commissions from all the rulers of England between Charles II and Queen Anne, across revolutions in dynasty, politics and religion. His task here was to cover, in appropriately grand style, the ceremonial stairway, designed by Christopher Wren, that led up to the state-rooms of the King’s Apartments on the first floor, hence ‘King’s Staircase’ (Fig. 6.1).²

It is hard now, as you walk up the steps, to get much sense of the decoration’s theme, beyond its apparently colossal overstatement. All you catch, at first sight, is an assortment of ancient gods and goddesses sprawling over the ceiling, Hercules with his club improbably balanced on a cloud, an unusually languorous, scantily clad collection of Muses (also on a cloud, topped by a rather self-satisfied Apollo) and below, what looks like a slightly bemused emperor Nero crowned with laurel and strumming a guitar (Fig. 6.2b). It was not until the 1930s, after generations of bafflement recorded in the guidebooks to Hampton Court, that one art historian spotted what originally lay behind all this. Verrio had produced a version in paint of a curious satire on the Roman emperors, written by one of their number: the fourth-century emperor Julian, now best known for his attempt at a pagan revival in the face of ascendant Christianity (hence his nickname ‘the Apostate’). The Caesars is one of a number of his surviving works, all written in Greek—from mystical pagan theology to a book archly entitled ‘The Beard Hater’ (Misopogon), combining an ironic defence of his own appearance (beard included) with an attack on some of his ungrateful subjects.³

6.1  Antonio Verrio’s early eighteenth-century baroque spectacle on the ‘King’s Staircase’ at Hampton Court Palace makes much more sense when you know the story on which it is based: the emperor Julian’s The Caesars (mid-fourth century CE), satirising his predecessors. On the main wall, a group of Roman emperors stands on the ground, with Alexander the Great coming to join from the left, all hoping to be admitted to a heavenly dinner party; their empty table is ready on a cloud above their heads, while the gods themselves are visible on the ceiling; also balanced on clouds in mid-air are Hercules and Romulus (the host) with his wolf. At the top of the left-hand wall, the god Apollo plays his lyre, reclining above the Muses.

A simple joke drives The Caesars. It is Roman party time and Romulus, Rome’s founder (who has since become a god), has decided to invite the past emperors to a literally divine banquet. The top tables have been arranged for the Olympian deities in strict order of seniority, from Zeus and his father Kronos down to the minor gods. A lower table has been prepared for the emperors, who file in one by one, a large selection of all four hundred years of them, from Julius Caesar down to Julian’s immediate predecessors. They are not appealing guests for the divine company. Watch out for Caesar, Zeus is warned, he is after your kingdom. Nero is written off as a wannabe Apollo. Hadrian can do nothing but look for his lost boyfriend. And so on. The vast majority of these would-be revellers are disinvited from the party immediately, before the gods hold a more formal—and occasionally hilarious—vetting procedure to judge the relative worth of those left: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Constantine and Alexander the Great, whom Hercules has squeezed into the competition at the last minute. At the end of this, after a secret ballot, Marcus Aurelius is declared the winner; though it is not clear that any of the emperors actually get to sup with the gods.⁴

6.2  Four Roman rulers from the ‘King’s Staircase’: (a) a rather haughty Julius Caesar turns his back on Augustus, who is being pestered by the philosopher Zeno; (b) Nero strumming his guitar; (c) on an adjacent wall, the fourth-century emperor Julian is writing at his desk, the god Mercury/Hermes hovering behind to inspire him.

This is the key to the painting. Julian is shown on a side wall near the top of the stairs, with the god Hermes or Mercury (whom he claims inspired his satire) looking over his shoulder (Fig. 6.2c.).⁵ On the upper levels, among the fluffy clouds, are the proper Olympian gods, and just underneath is an empty table apparently waiting for the emperors to take their place. But for the time being, immediately below Romulus and his wolf, a selection of them are kept waiting in the human world, while Alexander is coming to join the party from the left, closely followed by a ‘Winged Victory’. Not all the emperors are identifiable. But in addition to Nero with his guitar, the prominent character at the centre of the imperial group, in the red top, makes a fairly convincing Julius Caesar, and just to the right of him is Augustus (his companion, draped in white, must be the philosopher Zeno, who—in Julian’s skit—was assigned to Augustus by the gods, to give him some wisdom) (Fig. 6.2a).

There is a close fit between text and image. But the big question is: what on earth was the point? Why did Verrio decorate (or daub) the walls of a royal palace with a visual version of a satire that cast almost every Roman emperor as somewhere on the spectrum between villain and idiot? It has been tempting to find a coded religious and political message here. Some modern interpretations have seen King William himself in the figure of Alexander, portrayed as if the equal of all the Roman emperors put together. Or, more specifically, they have detected an assertion of William’s Protestantism again the Catholicism of his predecessor James II, represented here by these Roman rulers (is the slightly sinister figure of Zeno a covert attack on clerics?). Another view more subtly suggests we see the painting as an ‘interactive essay’ on William’s qualities as ruler, casting him in very different roles, not just as the triumphant Alexander, but as Julian himself (his tolerant paganism equated with Protestantism) and even as the Apollo on his cloud, more glorious than self-satisfied, bringing back an era of culture.⁶

None of this is impossible. It is certainly true that Julian was better known and more widely read around 1700 than he has been since (although, even then, he was hardly a recognisable figure outside a small circle of the cultural elite). But there are serious difficulties with these coded meanings. Whether or not his tolerance was admired, the public parade of Julian, a proselytising pagan, as a symbol for the Protestant faith would have been decidedly tricky—not to mention the inconvenient fact that Alexander was not actually the winner in the gods’ competition to find the best emperor; that was Marcus Aurelius.

Even more important, the attempts to unravel the hidden messages of the painting pass over what we see plainly on its surface. The surprising thing here is not what secrets may be dug out of it, but that in one of the most ceremonial areas in this royal palace we are presented with an array of Roman emperors as laughable failures (Marcus Aurelius apart). This is a very long way indeed from those powerful symbols of imperial power that we so often assume such line-ups to be. Why?

We are never likely to discover the intentions of Verrio, or of William III, or even the reactions of all those, from servants to ambassadors, who went up and down the stairs before the centuries of general bafflement set in. But these strikingly disconcerting paintings prompt us to look more quizzically at some of the other imperial images in this palace—and then to look forward a hundred years or so into the nineteenth century, and its very different world of exhibitions, salons, galleries, competitions and public debate. Here too the complexity and the edge of some images of emperors (too easily written off, rather blandly, as ‘Victorians in togas’ or routine exercises in stale classicism) have often been overlooked.

But first to other Caesars in Hampton Court, and especially to Julius Caesar himself.

Mantegna’s Caesar

Julius Caesar has always been more intensely argued over than any other Roman ruler. Writers, activists and citizens have for centuries debated which side they were on: Caesar’s or his assassins’? Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is only one, brilliantly ambivalent, meditation on this question. In the early fourteenth century, Dante imagined the assassins Brutus and Cassius in the very lowest of circle of hell, their feet stuffed into the mouths of Satan himself, only slightly better off than Judas Iscariot who is chewed up head-first. A century or so later, two learned Italian humanists conducted a notable exchange of pamphlets on the relative merits of Caesar and Scipio, the Roman Republican hero who had saved Rome by getting the better of Hannibal (for one, Poggio Bracciolini, Caesar was a tyrant who had destroyed liberty; for the other, Guarino Veronese, he had actually rescued liberty from the corruption into which it had fallen⁷). When Andrew Jackson was accused of ‘Caesarism’ in the early nineteenth century he may (or may not) have known that it was a charge levelled at any number of Western leaders before him. As one recent writer aptly put it, for more than a millennium Caesar’s career has given ‘flesh and blood to the abstract categories of political thought’.⁸

Some of the divisions have obvious roots in modern politics (Poggio’s connections with the Florentine Republic underpinned some of his distaste for Caesar). But it was never a simple split between monarchs and monarchists lining up in the dictator’s favour, and republicans against. There was plenty in Caesar to admire, whichever side you were on, from the literary style of his own writing that was imitated, willingly or not, by generations of schoolboys, to his daring, high-risk, but stunningly successful military ‘genius’. In the medieval line-up of the ‘Nine Worthies’ he was grouped with two other warriors, Alexander the Great and the Trojan hero Hector, and he found a place, alongside Alexander once again, on one of the most expensive and brazen pieces of furniture commissioned by Napoleon, the ‘Table of the Great Commanders’ (its showy porcelain top decorated with scenes of triumph, slaughter and the heads of the twelve ‘greatest’ generals from the classical world) (Fig. 6.3).⁹ Few until very recently have followed some of Caesar’s enemies in ancient Rome itself, in wondering if his military success were more genocide than genius, and few artists have shared the alternative perspective of the eighteenth-century sculptor, John Deare. He depicted what appears at first sight to be Caesar in heroic combat against the enemy Britons, but in the inscription attached he reminded viewers that this would end up as a military failure on Caesar’s part (Fig. 6.4).¹⁰

6.3  The porcelain top (roughly a metre in diameter) of the ‘Table of the Great Commanders’, with Alexander the Great as its centrepiece. It features a series of Roman emperors, in addition to Julius Caesar, grouped together in the lower part of this image: from right to left, Augustus, Septimius Severus (bearded), the fourth-century Constantine (with jewelled headband), Trajan, then Caesar himself (in detail). The scene beneath Caesar shows him turning away from the severed head of his rival Pompey the Great when it was presented to him. The table was commissioned by Napoleon in 1806, later given to the British king George IV and is now in Buckingham Palace.

6.4  John Deare’s relief sculpture, dated 1796, shows Caesar fighting from a boat, while from the right a Briton leads the attack on the Romans. The original inscription underneath the panel indicates that this would not be a Roman victory: HOC [V]NVM AD PRISTI[N]AM FORTVNAM CAESARI DE[F]VIT (‘Caesar lacked this one thing to complete his traditional success’, a quotation from his own account of the invasion of Britain). Significantly perhaps, Deare was a supporter of the American Revolution, and this sculpture, over a metre and a half wide, was made to fit over a fireplace in the English house of John Penn, grandson of William Penn of Pennsylvania.

But going beyond the books and the battlefield, his other exemplary virtues for centuries provided a fruitful repertoire for painters and designers across Europe, even if the stories lying behind them have long ceased to be recognisable to most of us. Caesar’s ‘clemency’ (clementia) was always a favourite theme, particularly as it was displayed after his victory in the civil wars that launched his one-man rule in Rome. The leader of his enemies in that conflict was Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, in Latin), a once ambitious, self-aggrandising conqueror turned conservative traditionalist, who was defeated by Caesar in battle on the plain of Pharsalus in northern Greece in 49 BCE, and soon after came to a very nasty end, treacherously decapitated while trying to take refuge in Egypt. Caesar’s behaviour in the aftermath of Pompey’s death offered lessons for leaders ancient and modern, of all political colours.

The ceiling of one of the rooms in Federico Gonzaga’s Palazzo Te shows Caesar being presented with the dead Pompey’s ‘filing cabinets’ but ordering their contents to be burned: a magnanimous pledge that there would be no witch-hunts based on compromising information found in them (Fig. 6.5).¹¹ And any number of artists tried their hand at capturing the scene of Caesar’s distress and disgust at being presented by Pompey’s murderers with his severed head (which serves as Caesar’s pictorial emblem, next to his portrait, on the ‘Table of the Great Commanders’) (Fig. 6.3). Again, this was supposed to be a mark of his humanity and decency, even if more cynical critics have suspected that these were crocodile tears rather than the genuine article.¹²

Yet—whatever his virtues—Caesar’s assassination always looms large, and he could never provide a straightforward model for any modern dictator or dynast. The man who (to follow Poggio) brought ruin to the system of republican rule also brought ruin upon himself, becoming a symbol of the danger, even the death sentence, hanging over a monarch. It is very hard to look at any image of Julius Caesar, however ostensibly celebratory, without the knowledge of ‘what happened next’ creeping into the picture.

6.5  A classic example of Julius Caesar’s magnanimity: seated at the centre of the scene, he orders the correspondence of his defeated rival, Pompey, to be destroyed—so that any information it contained could not be used against others. This is the main panel in the ceiling of the ‘Chamber of the Emperors’ in the Palazzo Te, the Gonzaga pleasure palace on the outskirts of Mantua, designed by Giulio Romano in the 1520s.

That sense of foreboding certainly informs Andrea Mantegna’s series of nine paintings depicting Caesar’s extravagant triumphal procession in 46 BCE, held to honour his military victories all over the Roman world. Originally painted for the Gonzaga in the late fifteenth century (possibly commissioned by Duke Federico’s father), they were another part of the haul of art acquired by Charles I in the 1620s.¹³ They have been on display at Hampton Court almost continuously ever since. There have been swings of fashion in the appreciation of Mantegna and disappointment in the paintings’ dilapidated condition and botched restorations—none more botched than that started by the artist Roger Fry in the early twentieth century, which notoriously removed the face of the single black soldier in the procession to make it match the white faces of all the others (Fig. 6.6).¹⁴ But overall these Triumphs have been as much admired as Verrio’s Caesars have been despised. It is partly that admiration—for such a brilliantly vivid re-creation of Roman spectacle—that has obscured the uncomfortable ambivalence of the theme depicted.

6.6  The first two scenes from Andrea Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar, of the late fifteenth century. Large canvases, almost three metres high, they draw on ancient descriptions of these sometimes flamboyant Roman victory parades: with their booty, paintings illustrating the campaigns and slogans on placards. Here the single black participant, painted out by Roger Fry, has been restored to his rightful place.

Most of the canvases in the series concentrate on the many participants in the procession itself, its jostling soldiers, captives and curious spectators, as well as the booty and precious artworks that were being trundled through the streets of Rome. But if these appear to be a self-confident assertion of dynastic military success, the final canvas changes the tone. Here Caesar himself sits on his triumphal chariot, a gaunt pensive figure, who seems already to have some inkling of what fate has in store less than two years hence (Fig. 6.7).¹⁵ The prominent figure behind him heightens that unease. For this ‘Winged Victory’ takes the place of the slave whose job it was in the real procession to whisper repeatedly in the general’s ear, ‘Remember you are (only) a man’—in case, as happened with Caesar it was often said, success should encourage him to forget his merely human status.¹⁶ And a closer look reveals even deeper anxieties elsewhere. A placard carried by a soldier in the second canvas (Fig. 6.6) spells out the honours voted to Caesar for his conquest of Gaul, but it finishes with three ominous words: ‘invidia spreta superataq(ue)’ (literally ‘with envy scorned and overcome’).¹⁷ The truth was, of course, quite the reverse. Anyone familiar with even the bare outline of Caesar’s career would know that one of the reasons for his assassination was that he had not overcome the envy of some of his fellow citizens.

6.7  The final scene in Mantegna’s series of Triumphs, with Caesar on his triumphal chariot, raises awkward questions (as the ceremony often did for the Romans themselves). Did the glory of it all go too far? Was this an example of pride coming before a fall? Would the victorious general heed the message whispered repeatedly in his ear that he was ‘only a man’? In Caesar’s case, assassination followed within eighteen months.

There is an ambivalence here that sits uneasily, at the very least, with the pretensions to dynastic power or one-man rule of either the Gonzaga or the English monarchy. Perhaps it was because he understood this (rather than because he was a fan of Mantegna’s brush-strokes) that Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the short-lived parliamentary, or republican, government, withdrew the Triumphs from the sale of the rest of the ‘king’s goods’ after the execution of Charles I, and kept the series for the state. (What better warning lesson was there for any would-be monarch?) But another set of works of art that once had pride of place in Hampton Court, also on the theme of Julius Caesar and also later reserved for Cromwell, raises these ambivalences even more sharply: a group of precious tapestries commissioned by King Henry VIII, the palace’s most famous proprietor. The originals have long been destroyed, lost and almost entirely forgotten, and (as with Titian’s Caesars) only clever detective work can reconstruct them from many later versions and adaptations. But they comprised one of Tudor England’s most important and expensive masterpieces—and one whose precise classical theme and difficult message has been misinterpreted for centuries. If we take the trouble to dig below the surface (and it is some trouble), an intriguing story emerges.

Woven Caesars at Hampton Court

Henry acquired these ten vast Flemish tapestries, featuring episodes in the life of Julius Caesar, in the mid 1540s. Woven in wool, silk and gilt thread, each one was around four and a half metres in height—and, hung side by side, they would have stretched for a width of almost eighty metres. When the royal collection was valued a hundred years later, this set was priced at £5022, making it the second most expensive item out of all ‘the king’s goods’. That was more than four times the cash value assigned to Titian’s eleven Caesars (and more than eight times what those paintings actually raised), and it was exceeded only by another set of tapestries almost certainly also commissioned by Henry: this was ten, even larger, scenes illustrating the biblical story of Abraham, assessed at £8260.¹⁸

It is hard now to recapture the importance of tapestries in Renaissance decoration, both in terms of price and prestige, and in terms of their number (inventories suggest that there were more than 2500 across Henry VIII’s residences, even if that figure is inflated by some that were serving as mundane bed coverings rather than display pieces). Those we now see usually hang rather drearily, along the corridors of stately homes and galleries, in drab browns and greens, giving little hint of their original status and sparkle. Their bright colours have faded from long exposure to the light, and the glitter of the metal threads has been oxidised into oblivion. By the nineteenth century, many of these earlier masterpieces, which had often been more coveted than paintings by the richest European aristocrats—featuring themes from Roman imperial triumphs and the story of Hercules to the Garden of Eden and the Massacre of the Innocents—looked so dull and undistinguished that they were simply thrown away.¹⁹

That is almost certainly what happened to Henry’s tapestries of Caesar. They were noticed and admired by visitors to Hampton Court at the end of the sixteenth century (one praised the images as being ‘woven into the tapestry to the very life’). After being withdrawn from the sale of ‘goods’ after the execution of King Charles, rather than sold at what would likely have been a huge profit, they were later returned to the royal collection. Up until the 1720s, there are various references to them being repaired, relined and some moved around to different palaces, until a last fleeting glimpse of them is caught in 1819 (when, or so optimists believe, a watercolour of Queen Caroline’s Drawing Room at Kensington Palace shows one serving almost as wallpaper, behind the framed paintings on the wall).²⁰ At some point after that—unless they are lurking, abandoned and unnoticed, in some royal attic—they must have been discarded on the nineteenth-century equivalent of a skip.

It is, nevertheless, possible to reconstruct the general appearance of Henry’s series. For even more than painting, tapestry was a medium of replication. The original paper designs for the weaving—or copies of them, or copies of copies—were regularly re-used or sold on, sometimes a century or more later, to produce new versions of roughly the same scenes. You would expect a major series like this to have its descendants—re-weavings or slightly adjusted iterations—in the collections of other members of the super-rich of Renaissance Europe. And so, if you look hard enough, it does.

No complete set of tapestries descended from Henry’s originals survives.²¹ But some clever sleuthing has made convincing connections between a number of scattered documents, which appear to refer to later versions of this Caesar series, and individual tapestries that remain on public display, or have come to light fleetingly when sold at auction across Europe and the United States (these objects are still collectors’ items on the art market, though at prices far lower in real terms than those they once commanded). The arguments remain tentative in places. But overall, thanks largely to the later generations of these tapestries that once hung on the walls of Pope Julius III, two members of the Farnese family and Queen Christina of Sweden, we can get a fairly clear impression of the line-up of Henry’s set. The lucky find of what appear to be a couple of small preliminary sketches for one of the scenes has even helped to identify the designer behind the series as the early sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst.²²

Eye-witness descriptions of Henry’s tapestries mention the precise subjects of only two scenes in his original group: the murder of Julius Caesar himself in 44 BCE; and the murder four years earlier of his enemy, Pompey.²³ The scene of Caesar’s death is almost certainly reflected in a tapestry still on show in the Vatican. This is clearly dated 1549, and is one of a set of ten acquired, according to documentary records, by Julius III in the early 1550s, made in Brussels very shortly after Henry’s commission—though a little less lavishly (this set had no metal thread: ‘without gold’ as one inventory makes explicit) (Fig. 6.8).²⁴

6.8  Caesar’s assassination on a huge tapestry (seven metres across) in the Vatican, dated 1549 and almost certainly produced by the same workshop as Henry VIII’s set. Caesar himself is submerged in the central group of assassins; we see him on the left in the background being warned of the plot by Artemidorus—but taking no notice.

It features a terrible melée, in the middle of which Caesar is being dispatched by the daggers of the conspirators; while in the background, on a much smaller scale, the philosopher Artemidorus is vainly attempting to pass the victim a note warning him of what is about to happen (an incident recounted by several ancient writers, but which would become even more famous by being re-staged in William Shakespeare’s play).²⁵ At the top, a lengthy caption woven into the fabric offers what art historians have called a ‘moralising’ reading of the scene (finishing with the words ‘the man who used to fill the whole world with the blood of citizens, ended up filling the senate house with his own blood’). Moralising it may be. But it is also a quotation, slightly abbreviated and now universally unrecognised, from the description of Caesar’s death by the second-century CE Roman historian Florus, chosen to act as a key to what is depicted below.²⁶ It is only one of many classical allusions in these tapestries that have been forgotten, misread or mistranslated.

This Assassination is the closest we get to the original pieces owned by Henry VIII: made in the same decade, almost certainly from the same design and by the same weavers.²⁷ But, thanks to an intriguing and sometimes tortuous trail, the other Roman scenes that once, so expensively, decorated the walls of Hampton Court can mostly be pinned down. It is worth getting a flavour of the twists and turns of this trail by following up just one part of it—starting from a sixteenth-century tapestry that appeared at auction in 1935 and has since gone underground again (Fig. 6.9).

6.9  A descendant of Henry VIII’s Caesarian tapestries appeared on the art market in the 1930s; its current whereabouts are unknown. The scene, however, is clearly identifiable. Caesar has returned to Rome in the middle of the civil war against Pompey and—on the hunt for cash—breaks down the doors of the treasury.

This shows a group of men in Roman dress apparently trying to break down a closed door with a ram, their feet and brute force. It might not otherwise catch our eye, but the woven caption makes it part of the story of Julius Caesar: ‘Abripit absconsos thesauros Caesar et auro / vi potitur quamvis magne Metelle negas’ (Caesar carries off the hidden treasure and takes possession of the gold by force, although you forbid it, great Metellus). For those viewers in the know, it depicts the moment at the beginning of his war against Pompey when Caesar enters Rome and forcibly gets his hands on the cash locked away in the Roman state treasury, despite the opposition of Metellus, one of Pompey’s loyalists.²⁸ But more than that, a chain of evidence makes it close to certain that this tapestry is a descendant of one of Henry’s.

The first hint comes in an inventory of the tapestries taken by Queen Christina to Rome when she abdicated in 1654, among them a set featuring Julius Caesar. This included a Murder of Caesar and Murder of Pompey, matching the two themes documented at Hampton Court, and making it overwhelmingly likely that Christina’s set was related to Henry’s. Significantly, it also included a piece described as Caesar Breaking into the Treasury. That connection is strengthened by another inventory, which lists ten tapestries on similar Caesarian subjects (presumably another set of ‘relations’ of Henry’s) owned by Alexander Farnese, the Duke of Parma, in 1570. Each of these is referred to in shorthand by the first word of its woven caption—one being Abripit, the exact word which occurs first here (‘Abripit absconsos …’).²⁹ Just to clinch it, there is a visual link too. For in 1714, to celebrate the marriage of a Farnese princess to Philip V of Spain, the whole facade of Parma Cathedral was draped with their family’s two sets of tapestries on the theme of Caesar (Alexander’s mother had also acquired a set, as early as 1550). In a detailed contemporary print of the cathedral decked out for the occasion, you can see on the ground floor, hanging prominently (though reversed) on the right-hand side of the main door, precisely this design (Fig. 6.10).³⁰

In this way—thanks to a combination of archival learning and lucky survivals—investigative art historians have gradually been able to piece together the appearance of the original set at Hampton Court. One of the latest additions is a splendid tapestry of Caesar Crossing the River Rubicon (the act which marked Caesar’s invasion of Italy and so the beginning of civil war). This turned up in an auction in New York City in 2000,³¹ and—as I write—is awaiting a buyer in a carpet showroom there (Fig. 6.11). Its subject and caption, ‘Iacta alea est …’ (The die has been thrown), can also be matched up with the inventories of Queen Christina and of Alexander Farnese, and a similar design can again be spotted on the cathedral facade, this time at the top right-hand corner.³² The same goes for a more sinister image now known from three tapestries in Italy and Portugal. It shows a group of men consulting a prophet or a magician, surrounded in some of the creepier versions by an assortment of snakes and bats, against a witch’s cauldron. The captions on each are different, but one reads ‘Spurinna haruspex Cesaris necem predicit’ (Spurinna the soothsayer predicts the death of Caesar)—making this another of the warnings that Caesar received shortly before his assassination, here the dire prediction that he should (in Shakespeare’s words) ‘beware the Ides of March’ (Fig. 6.12).³³

6.10  A contemporary print shows Parma Cathedral in Italy decorated to celebrate a Farnese wedding in 1714—with several ‘Caesar tapestries’ on display. On the right of the main door, for example, Caesar breaks into the treasury (Fig. 6.9); on the top right, Caesar crosses the Rubicon (Fig. 6. 11); in the centre of the facade on the right, the decapitation of Caesar’s rival, Pompey (known from a surviving tapestry at Powis Castle).

There are, predictably, all kinds of loose ends in these reconstructions. If we add everything together, we end up with more scenes than the ten that comprised Henry’s and the other main sets. Were some added later, or substitutions made? There are uncertainties too about the dates and order of the later weavings, some probably as late as the second half of the seventeenth century. It largely comes down to making deductions from the style of the borders (though some of these have been removed or replaced) and from the different forms of the caption (as a rough rule, the shorter the later). Whether some of the individual examples that have passed through the salerooms once belonged to the sets owned by Queen Christina or the Farnese family is another mystery.³⁴ But overall, the reconstruction of one of the most sumptuous works of art in Henry VIII’s collection has been a triumph of scholarly detective work.

Except for one thing. No modern art historians (and, indeed, few of those who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries re-used the original designs) have correctly identified the ancient source from which van Aelst took his inspiration.³⁵ The result is that they have drastically misinterpreted some of the scenes depicted, and have completely missed some of the awkward implications of these Roman imperial images.

6.11  Caesar approaches the river Rubicon, where the female figure (of ‘Rome’) confronts him. The caption on the tapestry (almost five metres across) identifies the scene. ‘Iacta alea est’ it starts, ‘the die (or dice) has been thrown’, meaning that things are now all up in the air. It goes on to say, ‘… he crosses the Rubicon, following the signs in the heavens (and) so, impetuous, he seizes (the town of) Rimini’.

6.12  The scene on this sixteenth-century tapestry (roughly four metres square) has usually been identified as Julius Caesar consulting the soothsayer Spurinna; and the caption reads ‘Julius Caesar here flees the furious fury’. But the cauldron, the eerie bats and the sex of the ‘soothsayer’ suggest a different reading (see pp. 207–8).

Lucan on Tapestry

Henry’s tapestries did not simply depict key events in Caesar’s career, as has usually been assumed. And they were not, as a group, based on Suetonius’s Life or on any other ancient works of history. Instead, almost every scene in the series for which we have direct evidence is clearly inspired by the first-century CE poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, now usually known as ‘Lucan’. He was a victim of the emperor Nero, forced to suicide in 65 CE, after his involvement in a failed coup, and his one surviving poem, the epic Pharsalia, takes as its theme the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (its title referring to the final battle of Pharsalus). This is a bleak dissection of civil conflict, almost an experimental anti-epic, from which no character emerges as a true hero. How far it represents an unequivocal attack on one-man rule has long been debated, but Lucan’s Caesar (like his Pompey) is certainly deeply flawed, his military skill, drive and ambition put to horribly destructive ends.³⁶

Far from the highlights of Julius Caesar’s career, Henry’s tapestries were a visual depiction of civil war, seen through the eyes of a dissident ancient poet who was a casualty of the imperial regime—as a second look at them makes absolutely clear.³⁷

What first alerted me to Lucan as the inspiration behind the tapestries were the scenes supposed to depict the soothsayer Spurinna predicting the death of Caesar. This was, to be sure, a well-known incident in Caesar’s life story, unequivocally identified by the caption woven above one of the surviving versions; the captions on the others are more garbled.³⁸ But it could not possibly have been designed as that—for the simple reason that Spurinna was a man,³⁹ and a venerable soothsayer or diviner (haruspex in Latin) at that. The main figure here is definitely female, and—complete with snakes, bats and cauldron—every inch a witch. She can only be one of the most famous and lurid characters of Lucan’s Pharsalia: Erictho, the terrifying necromancer from Thessaly in northern Greece (in the tapestries she is even wearing a trademark Thessalian-style hat), who preys on corpses and conjures the powers of the underworld.⁴⁰ What is depicted here is the moment in the poem when Pompey’s son comes to consult her about the outcome of his father’s war against Caesar—and she orchestrates, with the help of a temporarily revivified corpse, a prophecy of Pompey’s imminent defeat.

In labelling this as ‘Spurinna’, modern scholars have been misled not only by their own unfamiliarity with Lucan’s Pharsalia (and with Spurinna’s gender), but also by the confident misidentification on one of the tapestries themselves. A big mystery of tapestry production is who was responsible for these captions, with what degree of care or learning they operated and how the texts were transmitted, or adapted, over different generations of weaving. Why they got it wrong in this case is unclear (whether unfamiliarity with the original source, or a more constructive attempt actively to reinterpret the scene). But one thing is clear: van Aelst, who originally designed the scene, must have had Lucan’s Erictho in mind.

From there, much of the rest falls into place. Another equally classic, and now equally unrecognised, moment in the Pharsalia is reflected in three descendant tapestries (one at Powis Castle in Wales, where it still hangs not far from the line-up of imperial busts; the others popping up in salerooms) (Fig 6.13). Two of their captions refer to this scene of battle as Caesar ‘killing a giant’, the other as Caesar ‘leading an attack’.⁴¹ The problem is that, among all his different exploits, there is no reference whatsoever in the history or legend of Julius Caesar to any fight with a giant, though he may on occasion have led an attack (as the sculptor John Deare imagined). But there is an easy solution. For here—although no modern art historian seems to have noticed—the smaller fighter (the ‘Caesar’ against ‘the giant’) is standing on top of a large pile of dead bodies. If you know the Pharsalia, this is an obvious pointer to van Aelst’s intended subject: the bravery of one of Caesar’s soldiers, Cassius Scaeva, during the siege of Pompey’s camp at Dyrrachium (near modern Durres in Albania) before the final battle of Pharsalus. In order to prevent Pompey’s troops breaking out, Scaeva threw down from Caesar’s siege wall the corpses of his own fallen comrades and fought the enemy from the top of this grisly pile (‘he did not know how great a crime bravery is in a civil war’, observed Lucan darkly). In the end, shot in the eye by a crack archer from the Pompeian side (the ‘gigantic’ figure shown here), he pulled the arrow out and continued to fight. It is this scene of disconcerting ‘heroism’ that is shown here, nothing to do with giants, or with the more generic ‘Caesar leading an attack’, at all.⁴²

The only tapestry in the series that can have nothing to do with the Pharsalia is that of Caesar’s assassination (the poem is unfinished and breaks off before that point, even supposing the story was ever intended to get that far). Everything else that is identifiable—even if sometimes mentioned by other ancient writers also—can be traced directly back to Lucan’s narrative. The Breaking into the Treasury was one of his famous set pieces, so too the Crossing of the Rubicon (the female figure at the water’s edge is one of Lucan’s distinctive details not found elsewhere), and the Murder of Pompey, treacherously decapitated as he landed in Egypt, a lurid version of which also survives at Powis Castle.⁴³

Just occasionally, muddled as they often are, the woven captions have kept alive the links to the Pharsalia. One set of tapestries, for example, depicts Pompey taking sad leave of his wife Cornelia, before going off to join battle with Caesar, a rare moment of tenderness in an otherwise brutal poem. Most modern critics, and early modern caption writers, have misinterpreted this as Caesar saying goodbye to his wife, but one woven caption correctly identifies it: ‘Pompey the Great makes for his camp; Cornelia sadly sails to the island of Lesbos …’ (and in another version of the scene, where the caption misidentifies the main figure as Caesar, in the image itself the logo of Pompey’s side, ‘SPQR’—‘the Senate and People of Rome’—remains visible on the standards behind the general).⁴⁴ In yet another case, even a direct quotation from Lucan has been missed. Above a woven scene showing the battle of Pharsalus itself, the caption begins ‘Proelia … plusqua<m> civilia’ (Wars … worse than civil). This is a famous phrase taken directly from the first line of the Pharsalia, introducing the theme of war at its most immoral. Whoever composed this caption was pointing to the original inspiration of the tapestry cycle.⁴⁵

6.13  The caption on this seventeenth-century descendant (over four metres wide) of one of Henry VIII’s tapestries at Powis Castle describes the scene as ‘Caesar making an attack’. But the details of the image itself—a soldier fighting on top of a pile of dead bodies, a marksman taking aim at him—make it clear that the original designer had a notable story from Lucan’s Pharsalia in mind. It shows Caesar’s soldier Cassius Scaeva fighting off the opposition from the top of a grisly pile of corpses, and being shot in the eye by one of Pompey’s troops.

What combination of ignorance, misunderstanding and determined reinterpretation turned a cycle of tapestries that recreated the story of Lucan’s Pharsalia into the ‘key events in Caesar’s career’ is impossible to know. It was a process, as the captions on the tapestries and the entries in the inventories make clear, that went back far beyond the endeavours of modern art historians to, at least, the later sixteenth century. But there can be no doubt that when the staff of Henry VIII unpacked the cases that arrived from Brussels, containing one of the most expensive works of art the king ever purchased, what they saw was a series of depictions of the dark epic conflict that had heralded one-man rule in Rome, and paved the way for a dictatorship that ended with Caesar’s assassination. Was there a lesson in this?

Negative Reactions

It would be simplistic to imagine that the scenes on Henry’s tapestries were taken to be a straightforward attack on monarchical rule. I am certainly not suggesting—amusing as the thought is—that there were red faces all round as the staff wondered how to explain the unexpected message of the new purchase to His Majesty. We know nothing about the commissioning process, or about the input of Henry himself. But there is no reason to suppose that he or his advisers did not get what they were expecting, or had even asked for.

Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Lucan’s poem had been popular at least among the European elite (albeit not on the scale of Ovid or Virgil), and we find several different, and to us sometimes unfamiliar, approaches to it. Not until the second half of the seventeenth century did the now standard political readings begin to dominate. One thirteenth-century adaptation of the poem into vernacular French, Jean du Thuin’s Hystore de Jules César, turned Caesar into a chivalrous knightly hero and his relationship with Cleopatra (a major theme in the last, unfinished book of the Pharsalia) into a triumph of courtly romance. This may, indirectly, have set the scene for dozens of later operas (most famously Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto) but it required radical alterations to Lucan’s version to construct an almost entirely new story. Less surprising are the many readers who saw the poem as a dire warning not of tyranny but of the dangers of civil war—a welcome lesson in Tudor England, for certain.⁴⁶

That said, even if many interpretations were in play, the unsettling version of one-man rule embedded in these images is not easily explained away. It is hard to imagine, as some have, that—whatever their source—they were meant as a practical lesson for Henry’s young son Edward, or as some kind of reassurance for the king himself (dressing up, for example, his hugely profitable dissolution of the monasteries as if it were the equivalent of Caesar breaking into the treasury).⁴⁷ The contrast with the scenes drawn from Suetonius on the Aldobrandini Tazze, made just a few decades later, underlines the point. Instead of omens pledging the successful transmission of imperial power, this series of tapestries offers the prediction of defeat made by a witch who dabbles in corpses. If the only view of imperial death on the tazze was the brave suicide of Otho, here van Aelst has focussed on the bloody murder of each of the protagonists. Whichever side you are on, the end is bad.

The combination, and repetition, of such negative images reinforces the unease. Imagine someone wandering around Hampton Court in the early years of the eighteenth century, whether resident or visitor, staff or monarch. In theory at least (depending on who was allowed where, of course) they have would have been able to see some of the tapestries still in place, and within a stone’s throw not only the ‘King’s Staircase’ with its emperors posing as failed dinner guests but also Mantegna’s subtle warnings of overweening power. Whatever conclusions they drew, it is another warning for us against seeing modern images of Roman emperors as uniformly and—for those in power—reassuringly positive. Of course, many, as we have already seen, were just that. Yet, in Hampton Court, that most monarchical of modern settings, the images on the walls were doing something more complicated: they were prompting a dialogue between a negative, or ambivalent, presentation of Roman imperial power and the power of the modern king; they were raising questions about how far it was possible to see modern monarchy reflected in the ancient; and they maybe even provided a lens through which the modern monarch could face up to monarchy’s discontents.

Imperial Vices and Imperial History

Inside and outside royal palaces, and for a wider audience, images of the power of Roman emperors have always gone hand in hand with the portrayal of their personal vices—and with the hint of the systemic corruption of the imperial regime of which those vices were a symbol. That idea was written indelibly into the history of Christianity, with persecution of the Christians by Nero and other pagan rulers being a staple of image-making from the twelfth-century stained glass at Poitiers (Fig. 1.6), up to the pious paintings and lurid films of more recent decades. But it extends in different directions, much further than religion.

Aegidius Sadeler was not the only commercial printmaker to suggest an alternative view of the virtues of the Caesars, in the poems that lurked beneath the images. The imperial portraits designed by another Flemish artist, Jan van der Straet (usually known as Stradanus), and reproduced in large numbers by more than one engraver in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, offered a similarly hostile vision of the emperors (Fig. 6.14). In these prints too, the accompanying Latin verses saw the worst in almost every emperor concerned, and not only the usual villains. It is not surprising that Nero is said to have been a ruler who would have been better off sticking to his lyre and keeping out of politics (wielding the plectrum not the sceptrum, as the poem quips). But Augustus is also denounced for blurring the lines between himself and the gods, an error revealed when (as one colourful but improbable variant on his death story went) he was murdered by his wife Livia: ‘when you <Augustus> dare to compare yourself to god, Livia is said by mixing poison to have reminded you of your mortal lot’. Only Vespasian and Titus escape unscathed, and that is partly—and uncomfortably for us—because they destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.⁴⁸

On these prints, however, the hostility is not only inscribed in the verses. Behind each of their portraits there are scenes from the life of the Caesar; and in some versions—where the emperor on horseback is depicted as if he were an equestrian statue—yet more scenes are engraved on the pedestal. The emphasis in these is overwhelmingly on death, destruction, imperial sadism and excess. In the background to the figure of Augustus, for example, matching the claims made in the poem, is the notorious ‘Banquet of the Twelve Gods’, at which—sporting a fancy dress that his enemies deemed close to sacrilege—he is supposed to have impersonated the god Apollo; and on the front of his pedestal is what must be Livia offering her husband a deadly poisoned fig. On the front of Domitian’s there is the unmistakable figure of the young emperor skewering flies with his pen.⁴⁹

6.14  Two of Jan van der Straet’s emperors, in a late sixteenth-century engraving by Adriaen Collaert: (a) Augustus; in the background the notorious banquet at which he dressed up as the god Apollo; on the pedestal, the naval battle of Actium (at which he defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra) and Livia feeding him a poisoned fig; (b) Domitian; in the background on the right, his assassination; on the front of the pedestal, he skewers flies; the verses accuse him of being ‘the foulest blot on his family’ and of ‘killing the innocent for no reason’.

That same image of juvenile cruelty is captured in some curious sketches made by Rubens, in the early years of the seventeenth century. Rubens is well known for his antiquarian interests and for his imperial portraits, from the single Julius Caesar that he contributed to a ‘multi-artist’ series of the Twelve to possibly two other line-ups of different imperial groups, which now survive partly as originals, and partly reconstructed from copies.⁵⁰ These portraits range from austere portrayals, in the case of Caesar, to something more fleshy, more human and slightly irreverent. But none are nearly as irreverent as the sketches of emperors that cover two sides of a single sheet of paper now in Berlin.⁵¹

These sketches may partly have been informal working drawings for some bigger project. Next to Julius Caesar, for example, identified by the phrase veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered), Rubens has written sine fulmine (without thunderbolt), as if still in the process of deciding what attributes to give him. But some of them seem also to have taken on a life of their own as humorous caricatures. On the other side of the paper (Fig. 6.15) an almost laughably thuggish Vespasian is identified by what was once, according to Suetonius, his common nickname, mulio (mule-driver), while young Domitian is stabbing flies (ne musca, wrote Rubens, following the quip reported by Suetonius that ‘not even a fly’ is keeping him company).⁵² Whatever the ultimate purpose of these drawings, they remind us—like that fourteenth-century caricature under the plaster in Verona (Fig. 1.16)—that even those who produced some of the most serious and sober images of imperial power might simultaneously carry in their heads an alternative, more down-to-earth or comical, vision of the Roman emperors.

6.15  Rubens’s imperial caricatures, drawn on a piece of paper (roughly twenty by forty centimetres), c. 1598–1600. Vespasian is shown twice on the left-hand side (once, above, with reference to his buildings; below with the phrase ‘consul nicknamed mule-driver’). Titus faces him, with a reference to his victory over the Jews (and apparently a note to the artist himself to ‘check if the emperor carries a military staff on Trajan’s column’). On the right are two versions of Domitian, one aiming at a fly, with the phrase ‘ne musca’—‘not even a fly (is keeping him company)’.

But it was a couple of hundred years later that artists started to explore even more systematically, more subtly, more quizzically and more pointedly these failings of Roman emperors and of the political and social system they symbolised. And it is from this period that we have much richer access to some of the less than reverential reactions to images of imperial power, however reverentially those images might (or might not) have been intended. This was in the context of a very different world of art and its institutions. Paintings were not only produced, and survived, in far greater numbers and stylistic variety than ever before (by the 1850s, thousands of new works were displayed each year in Paris alone, making any kind of generalisation treacherous); but it was also a world of galleries, public exhibitions, academies, new forms of teaching, a wider range of patrons and buyers, a cacophony of ideological disputes and a new chorus of art criticism, commentary and journalism—which opens up to us a whole range of contemporary discussions, impossible to explore before.

At first sight, the canvases of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are second only to rows of marble busts as the popular image of ‘Romans in the modern world’. They recreate scenes drawn from Roman history or myth (side by side with those drawn from ancient Greece, modern nationalist myths and what are now little-known by-ways of the Bible), often on a colossal scale, and supposedly for edifying purposes. Exemplum virtutis (an example of admirable conduct) was one of the catchphrases often prompted by these ‘history paintings’ as they were usually called—an artistic genre that may be numbing for modern gallery visitors but for decades stood at the very top of the hierarchy set by European academies of art (above such ‘secondary’ genres as landscape, or smaller paintings on other themes).⁵³ But at the time they provoked a far more mixed reaction than is often imagined.

It is always dangerous to assume, in the absence of other evidence, that images of power in previous centuries went down as planned (all those vast images of ancient Egyptian pharaohs may have been as much spat upon as worshipped). We have already had a fleeting glimpse, in the satiric verses on prints, for example, of just how two-edged ‘examples of admirable conduct’ on the part of a Roman emperor had long been. But from the mid-eighteenth century on, column after column of printed commentary provides plenty of vivid evidence for drastically divergent reactions to Roman emperors, and to Roman culture more generally.

The English satirist William Makepeace Thackeray was surely not the only one to have his doubts about the model offered by the glorious Roman heroes recreated, for example, in the paintings of Jacques-Louis David. Was the first Brutus (the legendary ancestor of Julius Caesar’s assassin), who had his two sons put to death for political treachery, really a good example to follow in modern family life? Where did the boundary lie between strictness and sadism?⁵⁴ Nor was Théophile Gautier alone in feeling a few qualms, as well as admiration, in the face of the lavish evocation of the Age of Augustus by Jean-Léon Gérôme, commissioned by Napoleon III, and put on show in 1855 at the Universal Exhibition in Paris (Fig 6.16). The emperor stands centre-stage, defeating his enemies (Antony and Cleopatra lie dead on the steps) and bringing peace to the barbarian nations who are lined up in homage; but in a new spin on the old medieval story that carefully aligned the birth of Jesus with the Augustan age, a classic nativity scene sits prominently beneath the imperial dais. What concerned Gautier here was not (as had worried others) the awkward mixture of classical and gothic styles, but the fact that many of those doing homage to the emperor were from nations that would eventually bring the Empire down. Was this painting as much a presage of Rome’s downfall as a celebration of Augustan greatness?⁵⁵

6.16  Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Age of Augustus, The Birth of Christ (1852–54), a colossal painting, ten metres across, incorporates many precise historical references, as well as aligning the Nativity with the reign of Augustus. To the right of the emperor’s throne stand artists and writers. The bodies of Antony and Cleopatra lie on the steps, with Julius Caesar’s corpse just visible to the right—though largely concealed by his killers, Brutus and Cassius, dressed in white togas. The different peoples under Rome’s sway throng on either side, from a naked captive being dragged in by her hair on the left, to Parthians on the right returning the military standards that they had once captured from a Roman army.

In a different vein, the artists were sometimes judged to be simply not up to the task of capturing imperial virtue. In the 1760s, three paintings were commissioned from three different artists for one of the country properties of Louis XV, depicting noble deeds of the king’s ancient predecessors: Augustus shutting the Temple of Janus, to symbolise peace throughout the Roman world (Fig. 6.17); Trajan taking the trouble to listen to a poor woman asking for his help; and Marcus Aurelius distributing bread during a famine. The philosopher and critic Denis Diderot—while he admired the emperors concerned—had little time for the quality of their depiction. ‘Your Augustus is pitiful,’ he imagines saying to the painter. ‘Could you not have found an apprentice in your studio who would have dared to tell you that he was wooden, common and short … that, an emperor!’; and of the scene of Trajan, he quips that ‘the horse is the only notable character’. The king himself it seems had other objections. He was not bothered by such questions of artistic quality. He promptly threw the paintings out of what was in effect a very grand hunting lodge: he wanted scantily clad nymphs on its walls, not edifying examples of monarchical virtue. Ironically, two of the three paintings (Augustus and Marcus Aurelius) came to be appropriately recycled. In 1802, Napoleon’s staff came across them when they were looking for suitable decoration for the room in Amiens where ‘the first consul’ (his official title) was to sign the peace treaty with the British—and they have remained in the town ever since.⁵⁶

6.17  Carle van Loo’s painting of 1765, three metres square, showing Augustus shutting the gates of the temple of the god Janus in Rome—an act which traditionally marked those (rare) moments when the whole of the Roman world was at peace. It later provided an appropriate backdrop for the signing of the peace treaty between Napoleon and the British in 1802.

But the images I turn to now are not those in which we detect cracks in the display of Roman virtue, but those where artists have faced head-on the transgressions of imperial rulers, the corruption of empire and the fragility and violence of dynastic succession: first, a group of paintings produced or exhibited in Paris all in the same year, featuring one of the most notorious villains out of the Twelve Caesars; second, a much more diverse set of images that in depicting the murder of imperial rulers, from Julius Caesar to Nero, raises important and uncomfortable questions about the nature of the imperial system itself.

Vitellius 1847

1847 was the emperor Vitellius’s greatest year in art since his short and unsavoury reign during the civil wars of 69 CE. He had long been one of the most recognisable of all Roman rulers, thanks to ‘his’ bust in the Grimani collection in Venice (which was not him at all, but most likely a portrait of some unknown Roman of the second century CE) (Fig. 1.24). His image had starred in popular demonstrations of physiognomics, and—in only faint disguise—had crept into a range of famous paintings. But in 1847, in Paris at least, the year before the revolution that deposed King Louis Philippe and his ‘July Monarchy’, with riots and protests already breaking out, Vitellius was everywhere in the art world.

His most famous appearance was as a cameo in the most sensational painting among the two thousand or more new works of art on show at the annual Paris ‘Salon’: Thomas Couture’s huge canvas Les Romains de la Decadence (The Romans of the Decadence—or The Orgy as it was aptly known for short) (Fig. 6.18). It had been hyped in an enthusiastic advertising campaign for a couple of years before it was ever seen in public, and the finished product did not disappoint. Over sixty years later, an article in an American art magazine was calling for a reproduction of it to be on display in every school in the United States; for it was ‘the greatest sermon in paint ever rendered’. (American school children have had a lucky escape, one can’t help thinking.)⁵⁷

It was the kind of sermon that inspires, not by edifying example, but by an extravagant image of immorality; a mixture of shock and—no doubt—titillation. The canvas is filled with sprawling Roman banqueters in various states of undress, at the end of an all-night party (the sun seems to be just rising). Surrounding them are statues of men from the city’s glorious past, with a few austere observers on the margins, definitely not joining in the ‘fun’. It was a demonstration of Rome’s moral decline, with a few twists and tricky questions. In particular, what are we to make of the heroically nude marble figure who dominates the scene, based on a statue in the Louvre, traditionally identified as ‘Germanicus’—and, in contrast to the lascivious semi-nakedness of the party-goers below, reminds us that there are honourable and less honourable ways of going without one’s clothes? Germanicus, the husband of Agrippina the Elder, had been a popular and successful prince in the great traditions of Rome, once seen as a potential heir to the imperial throne. But he was also father to the monstrous emperor Caligula, and allegedly in 19 CE the victim of poisoning on the orders of his uncle, the emperor Tiberius. Here he serves as a hint that—whatever the exact date of the ‘decadence’ portrayed—the signs of corruption were inescapably present at almost the very beginning of imperial rule.⁵⁸

There was a wider, contemporary message too. Despite the politics of the moment, commentators at the time did not interpret the painting as a narrow attack on the institution of monarchy; but it was widely seen as a criticism of disparities of wealth and of the careless immorality of the contemporary French elite and bourgeoisie.⁵⁹ A clever set of cartoons in the satirical magazine Les Guêpes (Wasps), picturing the reactions of different Salon visitors, made this point sharply. In one, a thief decries the fact that the bourgeoisie in the painting has finished all the food. Another turns the social disequilibrium on its head: a man labelled as a ‘utilitarian’ points out that Couture’s canvas itself could have provided enough material to clothe a poor family.⁶⁰

But, towards the left of the pile of banqueters, the slumbering figure with the distinctive features of Vitellius—so comatose that he does not even notice the naked odalisque just a few inches from his nose—gives an extra edge to this. Although he is often overlooked now, he was widely recognised by critics in 1847, who referred vaguely to his ‘Vitellian’ excesses. ‘Glory to Vitellius Caesar alone’ hailed one poet in an ironic response to the painting.⁶¹ But what exactly is he doing in this scene?

In part, he may be another clue to the date of the ‘decadence’. Was the emperor to be understood as the host of this orgy? And so, was Rome’s moral decline already well under way by 69 CE? In part, he may be an allusive tribute to Veronese, whom Couture often claimed as his inspiration.⁶² In his Last Supper, Veronese had given the well-fed steward the face of the Grimani Vitellius (Fig. 1.23); here the artist is nodding to that by conscripting the same face for one of his own characters. But there are other implications too. Anyone who knew the story of Vitellius, and of his very nasty end (dragged through the streets of Rome, tortured, beaten to death, impaled on a hook and thrown into the Tiber, as the new Flavian dynasty came to power), would see in this figure a strong hint that this scene of debauchery—and whatever modern lifestyle it evoked—was doomed. For those who spotted it, the face of the emperor was a visual guarantee that punishment was inevitable. As in Veronese’s painting, the features of the Roman emperor offer almost an internal commentary on the scene, and a key to how we should read it.

6.18  Roman vice is displayed on an appropriately grand scale, across Thomas Couture’s canvas of The Romans of the Decadence, almost eight metres wide. The sun is just rising, but this Roman orgy is still going strong; one of the few party-goers already slumbering is a figure towards the left of the main group, whose features—widely recognised by critics when it was first shown in 1847—were based on those of the Grimani Vitellius (Fig. 1.24).

But this was not the only Vitellius to confront visitors to the Salon of 1847. Among a range of painters offering classical themes, from ancient mythology to the saints and martyrs of the early church, one artist put Roman emperors centre-stage. That was the now little-known Georges Rouget, best remembered, if at all, as Jacques-Louis David’s favourite assistant. He exhibited two paintings, exactly the same size, intended as a contrasting pair: the one, a rather cosy image of the future emperor Titus, learning the art of good government from his father Vespasian; the other a striking study entitled Vitellius, Roman Emperor, and Christians Released to the Wild Beasts (Fig. 6.19). The emperor, who is based on a (slightly slimmed down) version of the ‘Grimani’, sits gazing ahead, apparently lost in his own thoughts, with his back to the arena where we can faintly make out victims facing the lions. At his shoulder, a martyr in chains holds a crucifix, while a young woman looks up at him intently from below.⁶³

Some critics had fun reflecting that, in contrast to Couture with his decadent crowd, Rouget managed to conjure up Roman vice with only three figures. But they remained vague on the dynamics of the scene. Do we see an emperor unflinchingly set against mercy, despite entreaties? Or, more likely, are we to imagine that the painter is showing us the disturbing figments of the emperor’s imagination (the young woman may be his troubled conscience)? If so, then this prefigures some images, which (as we will see in the next chapter) focus on the awkwardness of power for the powerful, and on the human dilemmas and anxieties that may afflict even the cruellest tyrant.⁶⁴ But it is a very far cry from the other controversial role that Vitellius took in the art of this particular year.

During the summer of 1847, ten of France’s most ambitious young artists spent several months painting the gory scene of Vitellius’s murder. They were the talented (and lucky) ones who had got through to the final round of the competition for the Prix de Rome, which gave the winner not only celebrity, but also a generous bursary for long-term residence in Rome. It was a simple process, though often laced with controversy. Every year, each of the short-listed candidates was asked to produce a painting on a theme set by a committee of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts), which then judged between them.⁶⁵ In May 1847, the committee described the scene they wanted the contestants to represent: Vitellius dragged out of his hiding place in Rome, his hands tied behind his back, his head forced up at sword point so that his assassins ‘could abuse it more easily’. In late September, the winner and runner up were announced: in first place, Jules-Eugène Lenepveu; in second, Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (Fig. 6.20). Theirs were both grisly renderings, in which the emperor’s face was not simply exposed, but was almost tugged off by the angry mob.⁶⁶

6.19  An intimate depiction of vice (or of a guilty conscience) in Georges Rouget’s Vitellius, Roman Emperor, and Christians Released to the Wild Beasts, little more than a metre tall; it was first shown in 1847. Vitellius himself actually had nothing to do with the persecution of Christians, and the Colosseum, glimpsed in the background, was not built until after his reign. But the work offers an unsettling image of imperial cruelty in contrast to the ‘good’ emperor Titus, whom Rouget portrayed in a matching painting.

6.20  The assassination of Vitellius was the subject set for the ‘Prix de Rome’ in painting in 1847: (a) the first prize winner was Jules-Eugène Lenepveu, with a small but gory scene, just over thirty centimetres tall, set against an a-historical panorama of the city (Trajan’s column was erected more than fifty years after Vitellius’s death); (b) the second prize went to Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry with a no less brutal image on a slightly larger scale (it is almost one and a half metres wide).

The critics dissected the judges’ verdict. Lenepveu had slightly overdone the emotion, was one view; Baudry’s version was so ‘wild’, according to painter-turned-critic Etienne-Jean Delécluze, that it might have been done by a native Gaul at the time of Vitellius; others criticised aspects of the colouring and perspective, or suggested different candidates for the prize. But there was also unease about the subject itself. There had been plenty of mythical deaths and some bloody themes before (the biblical story of Judith decapitating Holophernes, for example, or Cato, the Republican ideologue and enemy of Julius Caesar, disembowelling himself). But this was the first and only imperial assassination in the history of the prize. It was not a subject, according to Delécluze again, which lent itself to fine treatment. ‘What kind of satisfaction can one derive from the representation, however well it is done, of a foul monster like the emperor Vitellius dragged to death, his throat slowly slit by soldiers and Roman citizens who have taken justice into their own hands?’⁶⁷

How do we account for this focus on Vitellius as the emperor of the moment, and the conjunction of his excess, his guilty conscience and his murder? Again, it would be naïve to imagine a direct connection between these Vitellian themes and contemporary dissatisfaction with Louis Philippe and the July Monarchy. The overwhelming majority of criticism in newspapers and magazines concentrated on technical artistic details, or at most on broad social parallels—certainly not on the Roman emperor as a coded analogue for the king. Besides, in a gesture to fair play, the final selection of theme for the Prix de Rome competition was made by lot out of a shortlist of three (in 1847, two much blander subjects were also in the frame).⁶⁸ Nonetheless, it would be equally naïve to deny indirect links at least. Delécluze’s comments about the people taking ‘justice into their own hands’ surely reflect underlying contemporary politics, especially as they appeared in a journal that was a strong supporter of the monarchy. And it is hard not to wonder whether the ten young artists locked away in their studios during the summer, working on their paintings of the lynching of a Roman emperor, saw no connection at all with the revolutionary uprising brewing outside. In one case, we know that they did. In a letter written the following year, Baudry (the second prize winner) complained of the anodyne theme set in the competition of 1848, shortly after the fall of the king in February: it was ‘Saint Peter in the house of Mary’. How could it be, he asked, that under the monarchy they had set ‘the agony of a tyrant’, but came up with nothing comparable under the new republic?⁶⁹ He, at least, had noticed.

Assassination

Assassination always attracted artists, and the murder of Julius Caesar was a popular theme from the Middle Ages on, with different political spins. But assassination was about more than bloody violence or covert poisoning, palace plots or popular uprising. In a history of the Twelve Caesars, of whom only one (Vespasian) died without any allegations at all of foul play, it was also an integral part of imperial succession and even the imperial system itself. Many Renaissance paintings turned a blind eye to this, preferring to show succession more positively in terms of favourable omens for the future (better to have the emperor Claudius marked out for greatness by an eagle landing on his shoulder, than—as Suetonius among others gleefully recounted—discovered ignominiously cowering behind a curtain after the murder of his predecessor). Artists in the nineteenth century, on the other hand, whether prompted by contemporary politics or not, regularly used imaginative re-creations of scenes of assassination to interrogate the imperial system itself, reflecting on the vulnerability of the ruler, and on where power really lay. How emperors died proved to be a telling diagnostic of the regime as a whole.

One of the most influential of these paintings, widely reproduced in prints, and even used as the basis of stage sets for performances of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was Gérôme’s Death of Caesar of 1859 (Fig. 6.21). The impression it makes is about as far as you could imagine from the same artist’s Age of Augustus (Fig. 6.16). The dictator lies in the senate house where he fell, ironically at the foot of Pompey’s statue. But this is now the moment after the deed itself, and the next steps are already being taken, the political readjustments already being made, in a world now without Caesar: some senators are simply taking flight; one large gentleman is biding his time; the assassins, daggers raised, are now in control (even if, as it turns out, only briefly). There is a very loaded contrast here with earlier representations of this most symbolic of all assassinations. In most cases (as in the tapestry in the Vatican, Fig. 6.8), Caesar is the focus of attention at the moment of his death; while he yet has breath, the victim is still star of the show. Here Gérôme is reminding us of just how fleeting autocratic power is. Caesar has been reduced to a blood-stained bundle, barely noticeable at bottom left.⁷⁰

Other painters chose other moments of murder to make other points. Jean-Paul Laurens, for example, a painter renowned for his opposition to the corruptions of monarchy, pictured the scene of the death of Tiberius in 37 CE—following the ancient rumour that the old man had been finished off by his successor Caligula or his henchman, Macro (even dying peacefully in his bed was not enough to dispel suspicions that an emperor had actually been suffocated there) (Fig. 6.22). Here a rather burly assassin, almost certainly meant to be Macro, needs only the pressure of his knee, and a touch of the hand on the throat, to dispatch the frail Tiberius. It is an emblem of the domestic setting of imperial power (the fate of the Roman world is settled in a bedroom), and it turns on its head one reassuring narrative of succession: here it is not Tiberius who hands on the throne to Caligula; Caligula steals it from Tiberius.⁷¹

Narratives are also challenged in re-creations of the next imperial succession, just four years later. Caligula was killed, along with his wife and baby daughter, in a plot led by a couple of disaffected members of the imperial (‘Praetorian’) guard, with a personal grudge. This is the moment when, in the absence of any more plausible candidate to take his place, they are said to have dragged the middle-aged, slightly doddery and decidedly implausible Claudius from his hiding place and hailed him imperator.⁷² It was a scene that Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a Dutch painter long based in London, painted three times between 1867 and 1880.

Alma-Tadema has a controversial place in the history of nineteenth-century art. He is best known for his elegant, often languid re-creations of Roman domestic life, in carefully observed settings, as close to authentic as the archaeology of the day would allow (from women in the baths to assignations on sunny marble terraces or customers in ancient artists’ showrooms). For some modern critics, he was putting a new kind of history into history painting, with a more democratic interest focussing on more ordinary ‘historical’ lives. For others, he was flogging a worn-out classicism, which was looking increasingly time-expired in the face of radical modernism (though the fact is that he was one of the best-selling painters of his day). Others again have seen his work as the commercial banalisation of classical themes for nouveaux riches clients. Just after Alma-Tadema’s death, Roger Fry, in the midst of his own bungled endeavours on Mantegna’s Triumphs at Hampton Court, wrote scathingly and snobbishly of his appeal to the ‘half-educated members of the lower middle class’: his paintings made it look as if he thought the Roman world was constructed out of ‘highly-scented soap’.⁷³

6.21  Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1859 painting of the Death of Caesar is a chilling image of power change. The dead Caesar, fallen in front of the statue of his rival Pompey, is only a tiny part of the one-and-a-half-metre wide canvas. What matters now is the sequel, and what the assassins (in their huddle in the centre) will choose to do.

Alma-Tadema did not produce many paintings that featured Roman emperors, but they were far more sophisticated than Fry’s silly generalisation suggests, and would have demanded rather more than ‘half-education’.⁷⁴ The spectacular painting of the Roses of Heliogabalus (Elagabalus), for example, commemorates not merely an imperial practical joke that backfires by smothering his guests; it also vividly points to a paradox lying at the heart of Roman imperial culture—that (in the ancient imagination at least) even the kindness and generosity of emperors could be lethal (Fig. 6.23). But Alma-Tadema’s treatment of the accession of Claudius raises further complexities.

6.22  In his Death of Tiberius of 1864, Jean-Paul Laurens magnified the scene of the emperor’s death in his bed into a large format ‘history painting’ (almost two and a half metres across). For an emperor, death in bed was no guarantee that it was not murder.

It is the second of his three versions, first exhibited in 1871, and entitled A Roman Emperor, AD 41, that is the most challenging (even though the artist seems to have been dissatisfied enough—or perhaps pleased enough—to return to it on a smaller scale a few years later) (Fig. 6.24). The moment depicted is clear. Caligula and his family lie murdered in the centre; some members of the Praetorian Guard (as well as a couple of women identified by critics at the time as ‘prostitutes’) crowd in from the left; while on the right another member of the guard bows before the newly proclaimed emperor Claudius who has hardly emerged from behind his curtain. But there are all kinds of telling detail. The new emperor wears some lovely, upmarket red shoes (it was his shoes peeking out, according to Suetonius, that gave away his hiding place). But he doesn’t have the power to match. It is the soldiers who call the shots; the new emperor must do what they say; power is not really where it seems.⁷⁵

6.23  In the Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), Lawrence Alma-Tadema captures the paradoxes of imperial power. The large canvas, more than two metres across, focuses on the ‘generosity’ of Elagabalus (emperor 218–22) in showering his guests with rose petals; but, according to the story, the petals smother and kill them.

So, is A Roman Emperor suggesting that 41 CE was a turning point in the history of the empire, with the victory of violence over legal order? Maybe. In which case, the distinctive marble statue of Augustus—daubed, rather like the statue of Pompey, in Gérôme’s assassination scene, with the victim’s bloody handprints—represents the once noble history of the imperial regime (before Augustus’s death, some twenty-five years earlier, in 14). But there are hints that it is more complicated than that, and that the statue of Augustus here points to the violence and lawlessness that was always at the heart of the imperial regime. That is certainly suggested by the painting just visible at the back of the room, labelled on its lower border ‘Actium’. This was the battle that brought Augustus to sole power in 31 BCE. But it was a battle in a civil war, against fellow Roman Mark Antony. Surely the message—not unlike that conveyed by the statue of Germanicus in Couture’s Decadence—is that the Roman imperial system was founded on violence and disorder from the very beginning. To put it more crisply, (Roman) monarchy was built on illegality.

Unlike Roger Fry, John Ruskin, the most famous art guru of the later nineteenth century, recognised, even if he disliked, the political edge in Alma-Tadema’s work.⁷⁶ Maybe in this case some of the potential buyers did too. The painting remained unsold for ten years, until it was bought by the American collector William T. Walters—and is now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

The End of Nero

If there is one painting, however, that represents more cleverly and succinctly than any other the capacity of nineteenth-century artists to probe critically the nature and foundation of the imperial system, it is the work of one whose home territory was Moscow and St Petersburg, not Paris or London or the Netherlands. But Vasily Smirnov travelled widely in the rest of Europe in the 1880s, exhibiting at the Paris Salon, before his death in 1890, aged only thirty-two. His most famous painting is a depiction of Nero on a grand scale, not the feckless strummer of Verrio’s murals, or the ‘fiddler while Rome burned’, but The Death of Nero (Fig. 6.25).⁷⁷

Smirnov closely followed Suetonius’s vivid description of the last hours of the emperor in 68 CE, when the armies and the city decisively turned against him.⁷⁸ He was abandoned in the palace, his calls to once obedient servants went unheard—until eventually he made for an out-of-town villa where (unable to do the deed himself) he was ignominiously helped to suicide by a slave and carried off for burial by a few loyal women. That is exactly what they are doing in this painting: taking the corpse to the family tomb.

6.24  Alma-Tadema’s painting of the death of Caligula and the accession of Claudius (A Roman Emperor, AD 41), first exhibited in 1871. Almost two metres across, it shows the dead body of Caligula in the centre, while Claudius (who is to be his unwitting successor) is discovered behind a curtain. The portrait of Augustus in the background raises questions about the imperial system as a whole. Was this a departure from what Augustus planned? Or was this kind of murder embedded in imperial history from the beginning?

6.25  What happens when power ebbs away? Vasily Smirnov ‘s huge painting of 1887, four metres wide, focuses on the abandonment of the dead emperor Nero, now tended by just three women—his power of command, and all his men, gone.

But there is a famous statue in the corner, the only work of art in the room, and instantly recognisable as the statue we now know as The Boy and the Goose—many versions of which are found all over the Greco-Roman world. It is a much-debated object (Fig. 6.26). Is it pure kitsch, or an elegant genre piece? Is it myth, or is it real-life? And most of all, what is the intention of the child: is this innocent fun or is he trying to kill the bird? In this painting, it is no doubt partly intended as the leftover decoration in a faded imperial property (according to the polymath Pliny, there was a version of it in Nero’s most lavish palace, the ‘Golden House’⁷⁹). But it is surely doing more than that. It shifts the interpretative dilemma of the sculpture to the figure of the emperor himself. How culpable was Nero? How far were his excesses innocent fun or juvenile sadism? The bottom line was: were all tyrants children (or all children tyrants)? The statue crystallises the dilemmas of the picture—and of imperial power—as a whole.

6.26  The sculpture in the corner of Smirnov’s painting (Fig. 6.25) is a famous—and puzzling—ancient group of a small boy and a goose. A version of this statue was owned by Nero, but is the marble toddler (playing with/strangling/torturing the goose) a symbol of Nero himself?

There is, however, a twist. Who bought this painting? Unlike Alma-Tadema’s Emperor it did not remain unsold for a decade. The Russian tsar Alexander III almost instantly snapped it up.⁸⁰ It might seem at first sight an odd choice for a monarch. But perhaps he, like Henry VIII, enjoyed this prompt to reflect on the complexities and difficulties of one-man rule.