1 Many details of the acquisition (including the exact dates and how, and from whom the objects were acquired) remain, at best, vague: Stevenson, ‘An Ancient Sarcophagus’; Warren, ‘More Odd Byways’, 255–61; Washburn, ‘A Roman Sarcophagus’. Elliott’s controversial career is defended in Elliott, Address (where he gives a few details on the sarcophagi, ‘Appendix’, 58–59). A modern archaeological analysis: Ward-Perkins, ‘Four Roman Garland Sarcophagi’.
2 Modern accounts of the reign: Ando, Imperial Rome, 68–75; Kulikowski, Triumph of Empire, 108–11; Rowan, Under Divine Auspices, 219–41 (focussing on coins). Charles I: Peacock, ‘Image of Charles I’, esp. 62–69. An overview of his portraits: Wood, Roman Portrait Sculpture, 56–58, 124–25. Different motives for the assassination: Herodian, Roman History 6, 9; Augustan History, Alexander Severus 59–68; Zonaras, 12, 15.
3 Lafrery, Effigies viginti quatuor; for Lafrery (or Lafreri) as publisher, see Parshall, ‘Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum’, esp. 3–8. Alexander does not easily shake off the number 24; he appears, for example, in that ranking in Tytler’s nineteenth-century Elements of General History, 612.
4 The brutality of Maximinus: Herodian, Roman History 6, 8 and 7-,1; Augustan History, The Two Maximini 1–26; Aurelius Victor, On the Emperors (De Caesaribus) 25 (illiteracy). Kulikowski, Triumph of Empire 111–12 succinctly sees through some of the ancient hype on these rulers.
5 Augustan History, Alexander Severus 63.
6 Harwood, ‘Some Account of the Sarcophagus,’ 385; looking back almost thirty years to his early service under Elliott, the author—by then a rear-admiral—systematically unpicks the case for the connection of the sarcophagi with the imperial couple (though the Latin of the ‘Julia Mamaea’ inscription defeats him).
7 There has been controversy over all aspects of this story: whether the tomb complex outside Rome had anything to do with Alexander Severus, whether the Capitoline sarcophagus was that of the emperor and his mother and whether the Portland Vase was found there. Sceptical discussions: Stuart Jones, ‘British School at Rome’ and de Grummond (ed.), Encyclopaedia, 919–22. Less sceptically, with full documentation on the finds: Painter and Whitehouse, ‘Discovery’. By the mid-1840s, reputable guidebooks were already warning their readers off any connection of the sarcophagus with Alexander and his mother: ‘this idea is rejected by the modern authorities’ was the firm line taken by Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in 1843. The complex history of the Portland Vase itself: https://
8 Jackson’s letter: Stevenson, ‘An Ancient Sarcophagus’; Warren, ‘More Odd Byways’, 255–61. Accusations of ‘Caesarism’ levelled at Jackson and others: Malamud, Ancient Rome, 18–29, Cole, ‘Republicanism, Caesarism’; Wyke, Caesar in the USA, 167–202.
9 The installation of the 1960s information panel: Washburn, ‘A Roman Sarcophagus’.
10 Stewart, ‘Woodcuts as Wallpaper’, 76–77 (discussing a late sixteenth-century bed decorated with this imperial paper). The interior design company Timney Fowler (http://
11 The title of this section is borrowed from Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman World (London, 1999).
12 Alföldi, ‘Tonmodel und Reliefmedaillons’; Boon, ‘A Roman Pastrycook’s Mould’. Gualandi and Pinelli, ‘Un trionfo’ contest the idea that these objects are moulds of this type, but propose no more plausible use.
13 The range and function of this portraiture: Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 372–429; Stewart, Social History, 77–142. Private images of emperors were more common than is sometimes imagined; for their possible religious importance, see Fishwick, Imperial Cult, 532–40.
14 Complete catalogues: Boschung, Bildnisse des Augustus, 107–94; Bartman, Portraits of Livia, 146–87. Estimated totals (largely based on how many were likely to have been produced each year): Pfanner, ‘Über das Herstellen von Porträts’, 178–79. A full catalogue of surviving portraits of Alexander and Julia Mamaea: Wegner, ‘Macrinus bis Balbinus’, 177–99, 200–217. See further below, pp. 64–73.
15 Augustus, Autobiography (Res Gestae) 24: ‘Silver statues of myself on foot, on horseback and in chariots stood in the city to the number of about eighty. These I took down myself.’ Romans sometimes regarded statues in precious metals as dangerously extravagant, but the claim to have turned an honour to himself into an honour for a god was typical of Augustus’s self-advertising modesty.
16 Walker and Bierbrier, Ancient Faces is a good introduction to these.
17 The painting of Septimius Severus and his family: Mathews and Muller, Dawn of Christian Art, 74–83. The text of the inventory, with discussion, is published in POxy. 12, 1449, and some key lines are accurately translated in Rowlandson, Women and Society, no. 44; it is also discussed in Dawn of Christian Art, 80–83, which argues that the surviving image of Septimius with Caracalla and Julia Domna is one of those listed in the inventory (though the idea that the papyrus points to four thousand panel paintings of the emperor Caracalla is based on combination of fantasy and inaccurate translation). The remarks of Marcus Aurelius’s tutor: Fronto, Correspondence (Ad Marcum Caesarem) 4, 12, 4. The Latin text is uncertain in detail, but the broad lines are clear (though some suggest that he is ‘kissing’ rather than ‘laughing at’ the portraits). Other lost painted portraits: Bartman, Portraits of Livia, 12, with Epigraphic Catalogue 45 and 52. The second-century CE epitaph of a man described as ‘painter of emperors and of all the better people’ (CIL 11, 7126, reproduced in Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 420) may conceivably indicate a portrait artist with a speciality in imperial and upper class subjects; but it more likely indicates a painter employed by the imperial house and ‘better people’.
18 Poitiers glass: Granboulan, ‘Longing for the Heavens’, 41–42 (for Nero in particular, see below, n. 24). The Lothar Cross and the problems surrounding such re-use (Was the cameo recognised as the emperor? Was it creatively reinterpreted and Christianised?): Wibiral, ‘Augustus patrem figurat’; Kinney, ‘Ancient Gems’ (113–14 on the cross); and more generally Settis, ‘Collecting Ancient Sculpture’. A later parallel, a sixteenth-century cross from the cathedral at Minden in Germany, incorporating an ancient cameo of Nero, raises similar questions: was it unrecognised, or was it a gesture of Christian triumphalism? (Fiedrowicz, ‘Christenverfolgung’, 250–51).
19 The Caesars at Versailles: Maral, ‘Vraies et fausses antiques’, 104–7 (and 110–11, for an even more lavish pair of imperial busts with bronze heads and gilded drapery); Michel, Mazarin, 315–18 (on those acquired from Cardinal Mazarin’s collection); Malgouyres (ed.), Porphyre, 130–35. The emperor series at Powis: Knox, ‘Long Gallery at Powis’ (with the eighteenth-century comments in Andrews, Torrington Diaries, 293). The Bolsover fountain: Worsley, ‘The “Artisan Mannerist” Style’.
20 One influential treatise is Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte, 629–31 (the instructions given on how emperors should be depicted are heavily, but not wholly, dependent on their descriptions in the biographies of Suetonius and of the Augustan History).
21 Pop-up decorations: below, pp. 122–23, 133. The sixteenth-century German chairs: Splendor of Dresden no. 95 (illustrating the Julius Caesar chair); Marx, ‘Wandering Objects’, 206–7. Tapestries: below, pp. 199–210.
22 The Spanish officer’s necklace: Sténuit, Treasures of the Armada, 206–7, 256, 265 (on the discovery, though misidentifying the figures depicted as Byzantine); Flanagan, Ireland’s Armada Legacy, 185, 198; National Museum of Ulster online (https://
23 Dessen, ‘Eighteenth-Century Imitation’ puts Hogarth’s Nero in the context of other contemporary allusions to the emperor. The caricature: Napione, ‘Tornare a Julius von Schlosser’, 185 (for the Verona series in general, see below, pp. 98, 314n35).
24 Medieval French traditions on Nero and Peter and Paul (including the glass at Poitiers): Henderson, ‘The Damnation of Nero and Related Themes’; Thomas, The Acts of Peter, 51–54; Cropp, ‘Nero, Emperor and Tyrant’, 30–33. Nero on the doors of St Peter’s: Glass, ‘Filarete’s Renovation’, connecting the iconography also with the use of the basilica for the coronation of the Holy Roman emperor (with further details in Nilgen, ‘Der Streit über den Ort der Kreuzigung Petri’).
25 The essence of the story, featuring the Delphic oracle rather than the Sibyl, goes back at least as far as the early sixth century (John Malalas, Chronicle 10, 5), and is found in many different versions: Cutler, ‘Octavian and the Sibyl’; White, ‘The Vision of Augustus’; Raybould, The Sibyl Series 37–38; Boeye and Pandey, ‘Augustus as Visionary’. Other, now even less well known, confections attempt to align imperial and Christian history: the myth, for example, of the fourth-century CE Faustina (wife of the emperor Maxentius) visiting Saint Catherine of Alexandria in prison was captured by many artists, including Tintoretto (in the Patriarchal Palace, Venice), and Mattia Preti (now in the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio).
26 Statues of emperors in Fellini (signalling the equivalence of the vices of ancient and modern Rome): Costello, Fellini’s Road, 61; De Santi, La dolce vita, 157–63; Leuschner, ‘Roman Virtue’, 18. The identification of some of the (modern) imperial busts featured in La dolce vita: Buccino, ‘Le antichità’, 55.
27 This feedback loop between modern representations and our understanding of the ancient evidence itself: Hekster, ‘Emperors and Empire’.
28 Winckelmann, Anmerkungen 9 (‘das neue vom alten, und das wahre von den Zusätzen zu unterschieden’); see Gesche, ‘Problem der Antikenergänzungen’, 445–46.
29 The description, as sixteenth-century, on its accession to the Getty: ‘Acquisitions/1992’, 147; Miner and Daehner, ‘Emperor in the Arena’ (with further discussion, arguing for a date in the 180s). The exhibition in 2008–9 is documented online (with details of surface analysis) at http://
30 Cavaceppi, Raccolta, vol. 2, 129; the phrase ‘chi le osserva con le orecchie’ is borrowed from Baglione Le vite, 139, who had used it to refer to the clients of his rival Caravaggio. The English gullibility was the prompt for many sharp remarks from the English themselves: the antiquities market in Rome is ‘so long exhausted of every valuable relic that it has become necessary to institute a manufactory for the fabrication of such rubbish as half the English nation come in search of every year,’ observed E. D. Clarke in 1792 (Otter, Life and Remains, 100). But it always depended on the point of view of the writer. The basic rule was that other people were foolish dupes, the writer himself a learned connoisseur. Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing is a thorough introduction to the art market in early modern Rome.
31 The blurry line between a fake, a copy and an original: Sartwell, ‘Aesthetics of the Spurious’ (postulating twenty-one stages between authenticity and inauthenticity!); Elkins, ‘From Original to Copy’; Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction; Mounier and Nativel, Copier et contrefaire. The Paduans: Burnett in Jones (ed.), Fake?, 136–39; Scher (ed.), Currency of Fame, 182–83; Burnett, ‘Coin Faking in the Renaissance’; Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 122–25
32 Carradori, Elementary Instructions, 40.
33 The history of its reworking: Walker, in Jones (ed.), Fake?, 32–33, and ‘Clytie: A False Woman?’ (the nymph Clytie is the sculpture’s rival identification).
34 Cavaceppi, Raccolta, vol. 2, 123–30, with discussion of Cavaceppi’s theories of art in Meyer and Piva (eds), L’arte di ben restaurare, 26–53.
35 Full documentation: Bodart, ‘Cérémonies et monuments’. The fact that the man who delivered the eulogy and in whose garden the statue of Caesar stood was named Cesarini cannot have been a coincidence (on the Cesarini collection, see Christian, Empire without End, 295–99); in fact, the name itself may lie behind the (optimistic) identification of the original statue as Julius Caesar. The career of Il Gran Capitano: Lattuada, Alessandro Farnese. An overview of his memorials (including the statue): Schraven, Festive Funerals, 226–28. Other such hybrid sculptures (including at least one in the same room as Il Gran Capitano): Leuschner, ‘Roman Virtue’, 6–7.
36 Statius, Occasional Verses (Silvae) 1, 1, 84–87 is the single piece of evidence for this; but there are other examples of similar practice (for example, the face of the emperor Augustus superimposed on the face of Alexander on two paintings: Pliny, Natural History 35, 93–94).
37 Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 133–34.
38 To judge from a letter he wrote in 1806 to Quatremère de Quincy, Canova believed (or found it prudent to claim) that the original sculpture represented the Elder Agrippina; see Quatremère de Quincy, Canova et ses ouvrages, 143, where he also, perhaps over-energetically and even before he had finished it, rejects the accusations of plagiarism (it is worth noting that very few of his other works bear any such close resemblance to an ancient original). The controversy around the work, the possible role of Madame Mère herself in selecting ‘Agrippina’ as a model, and Canova’s political intentions: Johns, ‘Subversion through Historical Association’, and Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage, 112–15; Draper in Draper and Scherf (eds), Playing with Fire 106–8 (minimising Canova’s subversive intentions).
39 Cavendish, Handbook of Chatsworth, 34 (night-time visits); 95 (Madame Mère’s complaints). The formation of the Chatsworth collection, including this piece: Yarrington, ‘ “Under Italian skies”’. The text of a later letter from the duke in which he described Madame Mère scolding ‘long and loud about the statue which she says <the French authorities> had no right to sell nor I to buy’: Devonshire, Treasures, 80 (also reprinting some passages from the rare Handbook of Chatsworth); Clifford et al., Three Graces, 93.
40 Barolsky, Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art is one recent study to underline this point.
41 Hall and Stead, People’s History of Classics.
42 Salomon, Veronese, 17–22; Fehl, ‘Veronese and the Inquisition’ (including the text of Veronese’s interrogation by the Inquisition in which he described the figure as ‘un scalco, ilqual ho finto ch(e)l sia uenuto p(er) suo diporto a ueder, come uanno le cose della tola’ (a carver whom I imagined to have come to amuse himself, to see how the table service was going).
43 The history of the Grimani Vitellius and more versions of it in modern art are discussed below, pp. 75–76, 218–26.
44 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18, 89.
45 Suetonius’s life and writing: Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius; Power and Gibson, Suetonius the Biographer.
46 Suetonius’s popularity in the Renaissance, including with Petrarch: Conte, Latin Literature, 550. The medieval manuscripts: Reeve, ‘Suetonius’. The number of printed editions: Burke, ‘Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians’.
47 Imperial family sculptures: Rose, Dynastic Commemoration. Other themed line-ups of different subjects in different media: Hekster, Emperors and Ancestors (for example, pp. 221–24, for the third-century CE emperor Decius displaying a series of ‘good’ predecessors on his coins); Mattusch, The Villa dei Papyri.
48 I justify a little more fully this caustic view of the emperor’s Thoughts (or Meditations) in ‘Was He Quite Ordinary?’.
49 As with the Agrippinas, there are a confusing number of imperial ladies by the name Faustina. This one is known as ‘the Younger’, to distinguish her from ‘the Elder’, the wife of the emperor Antoninus Pius. They are quite separate from the wife of Maxentius (above, n. 25).
50 Modern images of Julia Mamaea: see below, Fig. 8.4a and b.
51 A brief review of the problems of the Augustan History (including who wrote it, when and why): Conte, Latin Literature, 650–52. The career of Elagabalus: Ando, Imperial Rome, 66–68; Kulikowski, Triumph of Empire, 104–8.
52 For example, in Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, out of a catalogue of ninety-five pieces, there are just four imperial portraits (Caracalla, Commodus and two versions of Marcus Aurelius), as well as one imperial lady (‘Agrippina’), one prince (Germanicus) and three sculptures believed to depict Hadrian’s boyfriend Antinoos. In Barkan, Unearthing the Past, out of 199 images, only six are remotely ‘imperial’ (including drawings of the legs of Marcus Aurelius’s horse). Compare Aldrovandi’s ‘Delle statue antiche’ (see below, p. 53), which lists literally hundreds of imperial busts he saw on display in sixteenth-century Rome.
53 On the ‘fragmentariness’ of this image, see Nochlin, Body in Pieces, 7–8; the classical referent is explained in Edwards, Writing Rome, 15.
54 Anachronicity is the leitmotiv of, for example, Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction.
55 See below, pp. 283–85.
56 Among many notable studies of the construction of kingly, dynastic or elite power: Cannadine, ‘Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual’; Cannadine and Price, Rituals of Royalty (largely focussed on traditional societies); Burke, Fabrication; Duindam, Dynasties (including discussion of ceremonial alongside more narrowly political concerns). ‘Self-fashioning’ is a term I have commandeered from Stephen Greenblatt (Renaissance Self-Fashioning and elsewhere).
1 The discovery and identification: Long, ‘Le regard de César’ in the exhibition catalogue, Long and Picard (eds), César. The reaction of Luc Long to the appearance of the head is reported, for example, at http://
2 Critics include: Paul Zanker (for example, http://
3 Kinney, ‘The Horse, the King’; Stewart, ‘Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius’.
4 The identification of individual imperial figures on the cameo is still contested: Vollenweider and Avisseau-Broustet, Camées et intailles, 217–20; Giuliani and Schmidt, Ein Geschenk für den Kaisar; and briefly, Beard and Henderson, Classical Art, 195–97. Rubens, on this and other gems: de Grummond, Rubens and Antique Coins; more recently and briefly, Pointon, ‘The Importance of Gems’.
5 Winckelmann, Geschichte, Part 2, 383; translated by Mallgrave, History, 329 (‘the most experienced connoisseur of antiquities, the most august Cardinal Alessandro Albani, doubts that any genuine heads of Caesar have survived’).
6 The career of Julius Caesar: Beard, SPQR, 278–96; and, in greater detail, Griffin (ed.), Companion to Julius Caesar. ‘War crimes’: Pliny, Natural History 7, 92; Plutarch, Cato the Younger 51. The history of the ‘dictatorship’ (and the precedent of the earlier first-century Sulla): Lintott, Constitution of the Roman Republic, 109–13; Keaveney, Sulla.
7 The question of who counted as the ‘first emperor’: Hekster, Emperors and Ancestors, 162–77. The implications of the title princeps, Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Civilis princeps’.
8 The Greek precedents: Thonemann, Hellenistic World, esp. 145–68 (they are often more tentative than they seem at first sight: the head of a living ruler being hard to distinguish from the image of the dead Alexander, the head of Alexander from that of the mythical Heracles). Outside Rome (and outside is the key), a couple of cities in the eastern Mediterranean seem to have blazoned the head of Caesar’s rival Pompey on their coinage, already in the 50s BCE (Jenkins, ‘Recent Acquisitions’, 32; Crawford, ‘Hamlet without the Prince’, 216). It is a sign of where the wind was blowing.
9 The social role of Roman portraits: Stewart, Social History, 77–107. Funerary and commemorative practice: Flower, Ancestor Masks.
10 Brodsky’s poem: Collected Poems, 282–85; first appearing in English in the New York Review of Books 25 June 1987 (recalling an encounter between the poet and a bust of the emperor and reflecting partly on the history of autocracy, ancient and modern, partly on the ambivalent ways in which marble heads mediate between past and present—themes developed in Brodsky’s essay prompted by the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline, ‘Homage to Marcus Aurelius’). Portrait heads as distinctively Roman: Beard and Henderson, Classical Art, 207 (in the course of more general reflections on portraiture, 205–38). A Roman allusion to marble heads as ‘decapitation’ and a presage of murder: Pliny, Natural History 37, 15–16.
11 Dio, Roman History 44, 4; Suetonius, Julius Caesar 76. Modern overviews of Caesarian portraits and an analysis of key pieces: Zanker, ‘Irritating Statues’; Koortbojian, Divinization of Caesar, 94–128. A minutely detailed discussion: Cadario, ‘Le statue di Cesare’.
12 Pedestals in Greece and Turkey: Raubitschek, ‘Epigraphical Notes’. In Italy: Munk Højte, Roman Imperial Statue Bases, 97.
13 Suetonius, Julius Caesar 45.
14 An imaginary portrait of the mythical Roman king Ancus Marcius, minted in 56 BCE, showing ‘Caesarian’ features: RRC 425/1. A very different image of Caesar on coins, minted in the eastern Mediterranean in 47/6: RPC 1, 2026.
15 The vast majority of (and probably all) ancient ‘portraits’ of classical cultural figures, Greek and Roman, are conventional ‘type’ images, which bear no relationship to the actual appearance of their ‘subjects’; usefully discussed by Sheila Dillon, Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture, 2–12.
16 Wider issues in the attempts to compare Suetonius’s descriptions and imperial sculptures in general: Trimble, ‘Corpore enormi’.
17 Winckelmann, Geschichte, Part 2, 383; translated by Mallgrave, History, 329. E. Q. Visconti, in his catalogue of part of the collection in the Vatican (Museo Pio-Clementino, 178), commenting on a bust believed to be of Julius Caesar, wrote, ‘The uncertainty of his image on coins, not well delineated on the bronze because of lack of artistic quality, nor sufficiently distinct simply because of their small size on the silver and gold issues, has given a field day to those ready with their names <literally ‘baptisers’, battezzatori> to recognise Caesar in many heads and busts that do not resemble him at all except in a few general characteristics of his appearance.’
18 Gems are notoriously difficult to date, and the majority of those representing Caesar are now thought to be modern. One of the more plausibly ancient candidates: Vollenweider, ‘Gemmenbildnisse Cäsars’, 81–82, plate 12: 1, 2 and 4; Johansen, ‘Antichi ritratti’, 12 (both with other examples). A rather scrappy fragment of ancient pottery from the Greek island of Delos, with a moulded head taken to be Caesar: Siebert, ‘Un portrait de Jules César’.
19 The discovery was reported in the New York Times 13 January 1925. A more sceptical discussion: Andrén, ‘Greek and Roman Marbles’, 108, no. 31.
20 Schäfer, ‘Drei Porträts’, 20–23. The impact of the discovery (running the head from the Rhône a close second): Wyke, Caesar, 1.
21 Different scholars come up with very different totals of surviving Caesarian portraits, depending not only on the material available to them and new finds, but on the rigour of their criteria. One hundred and fifty is the grand and generous total in all media. In 1882, Bernoulli (in Römische Ikonographie, the first systematic attempt at a comprehensive catalogue) claimed sixty portrait heads. The number has gone up and down ever since. In 1903, Frank Scott’s enthusiastic and self-confessedly amateur catalogue in Portraitures reached eighty-four (though he included a number about which he had serious doubts, and others he knew about only at second hand). The most recent and sober cataloguer has trimmed the number closer to twenty: Johansen ‘Antichi ritratti’ and ‘Portraits in Marble’ (later, in ‘Portraits de César’, cautiously accepting the Arles ‘Caesar’ into the club).
22 The different suggestions for the Hudson River Caesar: Andrén, ‘Greek and Roman Marbles’, 108, no. 31. The archaeology of the ‘Green Caesar’: Spier, ‘Julius Caesar’, with further bibliography. Some of its different identifications: Kleiner, Cleopatra and Rome, 130–31 (Cleopatra’s statue, developing suggestions of Fishwick, in ‘The Temple of Caesar’, though Kleiner herself is more cautious in Roman Sculpture, 45); Zanker, ‘Irritating Statues’, 307 (‘one of his admirers from the Nile’); Johansen, ‘Antichi ritratti’, 49–50 (a modern piece).
23 Aldrovandi, ‘Delle statue antiche’, 200, describing it as in the possession of Marco Casale, an inheritance from his father. The background to Aldrovandi’s gazeteer: Gallo, ‘Ulisse Aldrovandi’. Different views on the Caesar currently in the Casali collection: Johansen, ‘Antichi ritratti’, 45 (Renaissance); Santolini Giordani, Antichità Casali, 111–12 (largely Roman). My hunch (and it can be no more) is that the display of the statue reported by Aldrovandi is as much reflection of its special, celebrity status as a practical fear of theft (as Furlotti, Antiquities in Motion, 190 suggests).
24 The history of the sculpture: Stuart Jones (ed.), Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures … Palazzo dei Conservatori, 1–2 and Albertoni, ‘Le statue di Giulio Cesare’ (both agreeing that its nucleus is ancient, probably second century CE); Johansen, ‘Portraits in Marble’, 28 (reviewing suggestions of a seventeenth-century date); Visconti, Museo Pio-Clementino, 179 (taking it as one of only two certain Caesars he knows). The clinching sixteenth-century sketch, by Giovannantonio Dosio: Hülsen, Skizzenbuch, 32 (although Dosio actually entitled his sketch ‘Octavian’, Julius Caesar’s successor). The sculpture also seems to match the description of a statue of Caesar in Aldrovandi’s sixteenth-century guide (‘Delle statue antiche’, 180).
25 Caesar as Mussolini’s trademark: Laurence, ‘Tourism, Town Planning and romanitas’ (on the Rimini statue, 190–92); Nelis, ‘Constructing Fascist Identity’ (with full bibliography); Dunnett, ‘The Rhetoric of Romanità’.
26 Le Bars-Tosi, ‘James Millingen’.
27 The sculpture’s museum history and changing identification can be tracked in the manuscript catalogue and in successive museum guides: Synopsis of Contents 1845, 92 (‘an unknown head. Purchased in 1818’); Synopsis of Contents 1846, 92 (‘a Bust of Julius Caesar. Purchased in 1818’). Scott, Portraitures, 164–65 reports (wrongly: he has misread his source) that it was once in the Ludovisi collection in Rome.
28 Baring-Gould, Tragedy of the Caesars, vol. 1, 114–15.
29 Rice Holmes, Caesar’s Conquest, xxvi. To be fair to Rice Holmes, his prefatory essay on ‘The Busts of Julius Caesar’ (xxii–xxvii) starts with full admission that identification of any of these busts is perilous, he gently criticises Baring-Gould for reading his ‘ideal <of Caesar> in, or rather into, his favourite busts’ and he reviews other top candidates (many now almost entirely forgotten) for the most authentic image of Caesar to survive. But in the end, he just can’t resist the bust in the British Museum.
30 Buchan, Julius Caesar, 11.
31 Combe et al, Description of the Collection of Ancient Marbles, 39–41 (quotation p. 39); it is possible that the slightly guarded phrase ‘Head supposed to represent Julius Caesar’, in the Synopsis of Contents 1855, 88 already reflects a degree of hesitation about the identification.
32 Furtwängler, Neuere Fälschungen, 14 (‘eine modern Arbeit mit künstlich imitierter Korrosion’)
33 Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, 27 (from a lecture delivered on 27 May 1936). He explained that he had used to enjoy taking a break from his work in the Library and visiting the line of Roman emperor portraits ‘till I finished opposite the bust of Julius Caesar. There, I said to myself, are the features of the foremost man of all this world.… And I returned refreshed to my work.’ On the phrase ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’, see further below, p. 241.
34 Ashmole, Forgeries, 4–8; Jones, Fake?, 144 commemorates its starring role in a ‘fakes’ exhibition in 1990; it had featured in a British Museum exhibition ‘Forgeries and Deceptive Copies’ already in 1961. Thorsten Opper has pointed out to me the similarity between this piece and the Julius Caesar in the Farnese collection which was restored by the sculptor Carlo Albacini in the late eighteenth century—suggesting that Albacini might have been the creator of the British Museum portrait, drawing on his close familiarity with the Farnese Caesar (now in Naples). If so, those who first catalogued it in the British Museum as an ‘unknown head’ failed to spot the resemblance.
35 The history of Bonaparte’s Tusculan collection: Liverani, ‘La collezione di antichità’ (including its dispersal, partly to the royal house of Savoy who were proprietors of the Castello d’Aglié). The excavations at Tusculum: Pasqualini, ‘Gli scavi di Luciano Bonaparte’. Canina writing his Descrizione around 1840 identifies the head only as an anonymous old man (p. 150).
36 Borda, ‘Il ritratto tuscolano’. ‘Psychological realism’ etc.: Zanker, ‘Irritating Statues’, 303 (an uncharacteristically gushing moment in an otherwise sober essay).
37 A rather rough and shaggy reconstruction of Caesar’s face, a collaboration between archaeologist Tom Buijtendorp and physical anthropologist Maja d’Hollosy, and largely based on the Tusculum head, was put on show at the National Antiquities Museum in Leiden: https://
38 This Caesar as his only portrait from life to survive: Simon, ‘Cäsarporträt’, 134; Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 45; and (slightly hedging his bets) Pollini, From Republic to Empire, 52. Discussion of the death mask: Long, ‘Le regard de César’, 73. A wax image of Caesar, used to provoke the crowd at his funeral, is recorded, by a historian writing in the second century CE (Appian, Civil War 2, 147), but I very much doubt that Caesar’s body was in any fit state for a death mask in the strict sense of the term to be made.
39 This is a common tactic in studies of Roman portraiture, which tends to group the sculptures of ‘Caesar’ that do survive by ‘type’ and classify them according to some imagined prototype, hopefully taken from the life, which does not. This method underlies Johansen, ‘Antichi ritratti’ and, to a lesser extent, Zanker, ‘Irritating Statues’.
40 A ‘mediocre copy’: Long, ‘Le regard de César’, 67. Ecstatic reactions to the Arles Caesar on social media were reported on Télérama 13 March 2010: http://
41 Ashmole, Forgeries, 5 notes the drill holes but largely ignores them. Colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art suggested that the holes could have ‘originally’ been filled and concealed with plaster (which is true, but I think makes little difference to the basic argument).
42 The identification of this ‘Caesar’: Caglioti, ‘Desiderio da Settignano: Profiles’, esp. 87–90; Vaccari, ‘Desiderio’s Reliefs’, 188–91. A brief overview of its context: Caglioti, ‘Fifteenth-Century Reliefs’, 70–71. See below, pp. 130–31.
43 The role of modern ‘portraits’, no longer taken as ancient images of Caesar, in establishing the conventional Caesarian iconography: Pieper, ‘The Artist’s Contribution’.
44 Exhibition catalogues include: Coarelli (ed.), Divus Vespasianus; Sapelli Ragni (ed), Anzio e Nerone; Tomei and Rea (eds), Nerone; La Rocca et al. (eds), Augusto; Coarelli and Ghini (eds), Caligola (343–46 for the new ‘Caligula’); Nero: Kaiser, Künstler und Tyrann. Enthusiastic and sometimes lurid reports of the ‘Caligula’: The Guardian 17 January 2011; Daily Mail 19 January 2011 (‘the debauched tyrant’), The Daily Telegraph 12 July 2011 (‘a crazed and power-hungry sex maniac’). The ‘official’ Italian account: Ghini et al. (eds), Sulle tracce di Caligola.
45 Addison, Dialogues 1, 22
46 The different identities proposed since 1822: Stefani, ‘Le statue del Macellum’ (concluding they are Julia, the daughter of the emperor Titus, and Britannicus, the son of Claudius); more briefly Döhl and Zanker, ‘La scultura’, 194 (the local founders of the building); Small, ‘Shrine of the Imperial Family’, 118–21; 126–30 (Agrippina the Younger and Britannicus).
47 The inscribed names (Claudius and Nero) on an important series of imperial images from Aphrodisias in modern Turkey: Smith, ‘Imperial Reliefs’, esp. 115–20). Even without an explicit label, no one would contest that the repeating figure of the emperor on Trajan’s column was Trajan himself.
48 Munk Højte, Roman Imperial Statue Bases, 229–63.
49 The details of these hairstyles have been bitterly debated, and the language of debate is sometimes as rebarbative as the hyperbole of the reactions to statues of Caesar. A balanced but critical discussion of the method: Smith, ‘Typology and Diversity’ (responding to Boschung, Bildnisse des Augustus). A challenge to the preconceptions of the method: Vout, ‘Antinous, Archaeology and History’ (followed by a slightly grumpy response in Fittschen, ‘Portraits of Roman Emperors’); Burnett, ‘The Augustan Revolution’, esp. 29–30.
50 Beard, SPQR, 337–85; Edmondson, Augustus. The ‘tricky old reptile’ was a quip of the fourth-century emperor Julian (Caesars 309).
51 The importance of images of (and in the age of) Augustus: Zanker, Power of Images (a classic account); Beard and Henderson, Classical Art, 214–25; Hölscher, Visual Power, 176–83. The role of emperors’ portraits more generally in ‘standing in’ for the emperor: Ando, Imperial Ideology, 206–73.
52 The different identifications of these pieces: Pollini, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, 100, 101; see also pp. 8–17 for the details of the hair locks, and identifying criteria more generally. The habit of ‘reworking’ imperial heads to change their identity: Varner, Mutilation and Transformation.
53 The career and political image of Vespasian: Levick, Vespasian (the tax on urine: Suetonius, Vespasian 23). The portraits and the ideology driving them: Coarelli (ed.), Divus Vespasianus (esp. Zanker, ‘Da Vespasiano a Domiziano’; and pp. 402–3 discussing my Fig. 2.12).
54 Introduction to these questions: Brilliant, Portraiture, Woodall, Portraiture, West, Portraiture.
55 Mementoes, 34.
56 The role of images during this civil war: Tacitus, Histories 1, 36; 1, 55; 2, 55; 3, 7 (referring to images of Galba in ‘towns’, rather than just military contexts). The portraits of Galba: Fabbricotti, Galba. The so-called ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ in general: Morgan, 69 AD.
57 Suetonius, Otho, 12; Galba, 21.
58 The incredible diffusion of versions of this statue in painting and sculpture: Bailey, ‘Metamorphoses of the Grimani “Vitellius”’ and ‘Metamorphoses …: Addenda and Corrigenda’; Zadoks-Josephus Jitta, ‘Creative Misunderstanding’; Fittschen, Bildnisgalerie, 186–234 and ‘Sul ruolo del ritratto’, 404–5, 409; D’après l’antique, 298–311; Principi, ‘Filippo Parodi’s Vitellius’ (esp. pp. 59–61, documenting the many modern sculptural versions in Genoa alone); Giannattasio, ‘Una testa’ (on the ‘Genius of Sculpture’); Gérôme, 126–29 and Beeny, ‘Blood Spectacle’, 42–45 (on Ave Caesar!); with further examples below, pp. 218–26. The history of the Grimani collection: Perry, ‘Cardinal Domenico Grimani’s Legacy’; Rossi, Domus Grimani.
59 Physiognomics: Porter, Windows of the Soul (the early modern history); Barton, Power and Knowledge, 95–131 (in the classical world). Phrenology: Poskett, Materials of the Mind.
60 Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia II, 29. Rubens was influenced by Della Porta’s work in his portrayal of emperors and others: McGrath, ‘ “Not Even a Fly”’, 699; Meganck, ‘Rubens on the Human Figure’, 57–59; Jonckheere, Portraits, 35–37.
61 Haydon, Lectures on Painting, 64–65
62 Manchester Times and Gazette 13 February 1841. Goyder’s autobiography, Battle for Life, 296–334, gives the text of his standard lecture, though Caracalla is substituted for Vitellius.
63 Various different views on the date: Bailey, ‘Metamorphoses of the Grimani “Vitellius”’, 105–7, with further discussion in D’Amico, Sullo Pseudo-Vitellio.
1 The identification of the sitter and interpretation of the Roman coin: Lobelle-Caluwé, ‘Portrait d’un homme’ (the first to propose Bembo); Borchert (ed.), Memling’s Portraits 160; Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces 102–5 (quotation on ‘worldly fame’ p. 105), Lane, Hans Memling, 205–7, 213–14, Christiansen and Weppelmann (eds), Renaissance Portrait, 330–32; Nalezyty, Pietro Bembo, 33–37. Vico, Discorsi 1, 53 writes of the coins of Nero (along with those of Caligula and Claudius) as ‘surpassing the others in beauty’; see also Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 160.
2 Lightbown, Botticelli 38; Pons, ‘Portrait of a Man’. The direct response to Memling’s portrait: Nuttall, ‘Memling’, 78–80.
3 Jansen’s recent study, Jacopo Strada, is now the central reference point for all aspects of Strada’s career, with full bibliography (taking a positive view of the Titian portrait, pp. 1–8; 868–73). Earlier discussions of Titian and Strada: Freedman, ‘Titian’s Jacopo da Strada’; Jaffé (ed.), Titian, 168–69; Vout, Classical Art, 107–8 (pointing to the erotic overtones of collector and sculpture). The ‘two gluttons’ phrase (‘doi giotti a un tagliero’) is from the correspondence of Niccolò Stop<p>io, cited and discussed by Jansen, Jacopo Strada, 605; 871–72 (the original documents are in Munich, Hauptstaatsarchiv, Libri Antiquitatum 4852, fols 153–54).
4 Further details: Jacopo Tintoretto, 136–37; Bull et al., ‘Les portraits’ (comparing the two portraits, arguing convincingly against the idea that Ottavio’s portrait was the work of Tintoretto’s daughter, and including the X-ray evidence for changes in both compositions in the process of the work). The gushing of the coins (‘perenni vena scaturiunt’) is the phrase of Gerolamo Bologni (in the critical edition by D’Alessi, Hieronymi Bononii, 8). More generally on the ubiquity of coinage: Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 3–11. Note, however, that a similar figure of (blind) Fortune pouring coins from a cornucopia—in Cesare Ripa’s much translated, and roughly contemporary, emblem book—is a symbol of female ‘prodigality’ (Iconologia, 163), hinting at a possible counter-narrative.
5 Haskell, History and Its Images, 13–79 (whose ideas inevitably lie behind this chapter, even though my emphasis is very different). In what follows I reference Haskell only to draw attention to discussions of particular relevance to my subjects.
6 Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost, Act 5, scene 2, line 607 (and, as Raffaella Sero has pointed out to me, the reference to Julius Caesar as ‘the hook-nosed fellow of Rome’ in 2 Henry IV, Act 4, scene 2, line 40, could allude to a coin image). Overview of the estimates of total coin production: Noreña, Imperial Ideals, 193.
7 Petrarch and Charles IV: Petrarch Letters 19, 3. Cyriac: Scalamonti, Vita, 66–67; Glass, ‘Filarete and the Invention’, 34–35. Further examples: Brown, ‘Portraiture at the Courts of Italy’, 26. A later gift, implying a link between Roman emperors and moral lessons, was made to Desiderio Erasmus in 1522 by one of his correspondents: ‘four gold coins of virtuous (bonorum) emperors’, mentioned in Correspondence of Erasmus, no. 1272 (my italics); first published in Erasmus’s De puritate, 97–98.
8 Petrarch, Letters 19, 3.
9 The complicated interactions, and gift-giving, between Petrarch and Charles IV: Ascoli, Local Habitation, 132–34, 144–45; Gaylard, Hollow Men, 5–6. Petrarch’s importance in numismatics: Williams, Pietro Bembo, 279–80. The Caesar that Charles gave in return: Petrarch, Letters 19, 13 (almost certainly a coin, but the Latin (effigiem) is a little vague). To be more generous to Charles, he may have been nodding to Petrarch’s use, in some of his writing, of Julius Caesar as another model for modern rulers (Wyke, Caesar, 132–33; Dandelet, Renaissance of Empire, 20–26).
10 The most active proponent of the ‘medallion thesis’ was Sebastiano Erizzo (in his Discorso, 1–112). Notable partisans on the other, correct, side include Enea Vico (in his Discorsi 1, 28–34; confusingly, 28, 29 and 32 are wrongly paginated as 36, 37 and 40 in the first edition); Antonio Agustín (in his Dialogos 1, 1–25). Modern discussions: Fontana, ‘La Controversia’ (taking the debate up to the eighteenth century); more briefly, Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 136–38.
11 Filarete, Treatise 1, 316 (original manuscript: Lib. XXIV, Magl, fol. 185r).
12 Vico, Discorsi 1, 52. Death of Vico: Bodon, Enea Vico, 45.
13 Vico, Discorsi 1, 48; Addison, Dialogues 1, 21.
14 Claimed ‘scarcity’: Weiss, Renaissance Discovery, 171. Price: Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 37–39.
15 Goltzius, C. Iulius Caesar. His life and writing: Haskell, History and Its Images, 16–19; Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 190–95. In his dedicatory letter to his earlier Vivae … imagines (fol. 3r), Goltzius closely echoes the words of Vico on the historical importance of coins, versus literary accounts.
16 The list of acknowledgements, and the popularity of coin collecting: Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 41–46; Callatay, ‘La controverse’, 269–72. Both raise questions about the accuracy of the names (some suspicious anomalies are investigated in detail by Dekesel, ‘Hubert Goltzius’). Callatay also notes that the ideology of historical veracity does not always fit easily with the fact that some specimens were ‘fakes’, and in the case of Goltzius, and others, some drawings and descriptions have at least been ‘improved’.
17 The princess’s boast: Kroll, Letters from Liselotte, 133; original German, Künzel, Die Briefe der Liselotte, 291 (she goes on to claim to have a total of 410 coins in her collection). Though the primary data are inconsistent, the collection owned by Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92) certainly numbered well over two thousand (the evidence: Fusco and Corti, Lorenzo de’ Medici, 83–92).
18 Plaquettes: Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders, 140–42. The casket: Haag (ed.), All’Antica, 238 (followed on p. 239 by a gilded bowl inset with original Roman coins). For the chalice: Tesori gotici, no. 29. (Many thanks to Frank Dabell and Jay Weissberg for introducing me to this extraordinary piece.)
19 Viljoen, ‘Paper Value’, 211–13.
20 Cunnally, ‘Of Mauss and (Renaissance) Men’, esp. 30–32, who rightly stresses that the Renaissance view of ancient art was ‘nummocentric’ (‘coin-centred’) in contrast to our modern ‘marmorcentric’ (‘marble-centred’) view.
21 An overview of Renaissance representations and adaptations of Roman coins, and further examples: Fittschen, ‘Sul ruolo del ritratto antico’, 388–94; Haskell, History and Its Images, esp. 26–36; Bacci, ‘Ritratti di imperatori’.
22 Fermo, Biblioteca comunale, MS 81. Discussion with further references: Brown, Venice and Antiquity, 66–68; Schmitt, ‘Zur Wiederbelebung’.
23 There are three manuscripts of this work: one in the Vatican (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chig. I VII 259), an autograph copy, but lacking the beginning (starting only with the reign of Septimius Severus); one in Verona (Biblioteca comunale, Cod CCIV) with far fewer finished illustrations; and one much more fragmentary version in Rome (Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Cod. D 13). A brief discussion: Weiss, Renaissance Discovery, 22–24. Detailed study of the links with coinage: Schmitt, ‘Zur Wiederbelebung’; Capoduro, ‘Effigi di imperatori’; Bodon, Veneranda Antiquitas, 203–17 (showing that the series started from Julius Caesar, not Augustus as usually thought).
24 Paris, BNF, MS lat. 5814. Discussion: Alexander (ed.), Painted Page, 157–8. The almost overwhelming arguments for seeing Bernardo Bembo as its commissioner: Nalezyty, Pietro Bembo, 53.
25 Fulvio, Illustrium imagines. Brief introduction: Weiss, Renaissance Discovery, 178–79; Haskell, History and Its Images, 28–30; and see further below, pp. 164, 253.
26 Raimondi’s prints: Viljoen, ‘Paper Value’ (his Twelve are not exactly the Suetonian set, Trajan substituting for Caligula; see below, pp. 131–33). The Florentine reliefs: Caglioti, ‘Fifteenth-Century Reliefs’; Bacci, ‘Ritratti di imperatori’, 30–47.
27 The emperors within the overall scheme of the Camera picta: Christiansen, Genius of Andrea Mantegna, 27–38; Campbell, Andrea Mantegna, 203–11 and see below, p. 169, with n40.
28 Different perspectives on the Certosa portraits: Burnett and Schofield, ‘Medallions’; Morscheck, ‘The Certosa Medallions’. The Horton medallions: https://
29 Brown, ‘Corroborative Detail’, 91; Panazza, ‘Profili all’antica’, 224–25 (though Brown believes the unnamed emperors to be Julius Caesar and Augustus, and Panazza believes them to be Claudius and Tiberius, they seem to me consistent with the more appropriate pairing of Augustus and Tiberius). Compare Titian’s painting of The Crown of Thorns (now in the Louvre), where a bust, clearly labelled ‘Tiberius’, the emperor at the time of the crucifixion, presides over the scene.
30 Brown, ‘Corroborative Detail’.
31 Rouillé, Promptuaire 1, A4v. The fragile boundary between truth, fake and fantasy, in this case and more widely: Perkinson, ‘From an “Art de Memoire”’, esp.700–707. See further below, p. 99.
32 The confusion of Caracalla and Marcus Aurelius: Capoduro, ‘Effigi di imperatori’, 292–95 and 308–9. The full names of Vespasian and Titus, imperial father and son, were almost identical; hence Raimondi’s understandable error.
33 See below, pp. 131–32.
34 Burnett and Schofield, ‘Medallions’, 6.
35 The links between il Mansionario and these paintings: Capoduro, ‘Effigi di imperatori’; Napione, ‘I sottarchi’. The whole scheme: Richards, Altichiero, 35–75.
36 This image of the god featured on a coin minted under Cato’s authority (RRC 462/2) or—an even closer match—on one minted by an older relative of the same name (RRC 343/2 a and b). Fulvio, or his draughtsman, must have taken one of these coin images, with ‘Cato’ written around them, as a portrait of the man himself.
37 Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 96–102; Haskell, History and Its Images, 30–32.
38 For the source of this image, see above, n. 28.
39 Aretino, Humanità, 466–67. The influence of this book on Titian: Waddington, ‘Aretino, Titian’. (This has provided an ingenious explanation for the fact that the bust in Titian’s Crown of Thorns (n. 29 above) seems to resemble images of Nero, despite being clearly labelled as Tiberius: Casini, ‘Cristo e i manigoldi’, 113).
40 The term all’antica was first used in English in the early seventeenth century (Oxford English Dictionary). Introductory discussions which take this idiom seriously: Ayres, Classical Culture, 63–75; Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 78–134; Baker, Marble Index, esp. 34–35, 77–87, 92–105.
41 The commissioning of the statues (in thanks for royal donations to the University): Willis, Architectural History, 55–57, 59–60. The scathing put-down can be found in the comments (18 January 2012) to a blog I wrote on the subject: www
42 In what follows, I take a necessarily broad overview of this tradition. Detailed dissection of small but significant differences in, especially, marble sculpture, with a keen eye for slight chronological and functional shifts: Craske, Silent Rhetoric and Baker, Marble Index (who wrily observes that one can read Wilton’s ‘George’ as a slight parody of Rysbrack’s: p. 106).
43 The statue of Pitt originally stood in a cenotaph to the prime minister in the National Debt Redemption Office: Darley, John Soane, 253–54. Its history and transfer to Pembroke: Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture, 60–61.
44 Baker, Marble Index, 79; ‘ “A Sort of Corporate Company”’, 26–28. ‘Merged’ is the term chosen by Baker, who notes that the sitter, Daniel Finch, had paintings of scenes from the life of Caesar in his country house at Burley-on-the-Hill in Rutland.
45 See Redford, Dilettanti, 19–29, with ‘Seria Ludo’, an earlier version of the same discussion. The explanatory text on the painting (appearing on this one alone in the set) makes it clear that we are to imagine Sackville is shown as he appeared at the carnival (‘Saturnalia’) in Florence, ‘sub persona consulis Romani ab exercitu redeuntis’, (impersonating [literally, ‘under the mask of’] a Roman consul returning from his army). There are hints of Titian’s emperors in some other portraits in Knapton’s series (especially that of William Denny, which looks back to Titian’s Claudius).
46 See Wood, ‘Van Dyck’s “Cabinet de Titien”’, 680; Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 84–86; the painting is discussed in Wheelock et al., Anthony van Dyck, 294–95 (without reference to the source). The imperial imagery of Charles I in general: Peacock, ‘Image of Charles I’.
47 The original layout and the collection: Angelicoussis, ‘Walpole’s Roman Legion’. Among the six ‘emperors’ and two imperial ladies (some certainly wrongly identified), the two most notable ancient busts are Commodus and Septimius Severus: https://
48 Suetonius, Augustus 29.
49 RCIN 51661: https://
50 The statue is based on the fifth-century BCE statue of the god Zeus in his temple at Olympia; despite the stress on republican ‘liberty’ on the inscription on the statue, it could not efface the awkward point that Washington was here portrayed as divine. Of much written on this reviled statue: Wills, ‘Washington’s Citizen Virtue’ and Cincinnatus, 55–84; Clark, ‘An Icon Preserved’; Savage, Monument Wars, 49–52. Washington’s own doubts about ‘a servile adherence to the garb of antiquity’: Fitzpatrick, Writings, 504 (a letter to Thomas Jefferson); McNairn, Behold the Hero, 135.
51 Baker (Marble Index, 92–95) recognises the problems of representing a Republican image in modern marble, but in my view underestimates them. ‘The British ruling elite’s self-identification with the political ideals of Republican Rome’ (p. 92) was certainly underpinned by important literary texts of the first century BCE, notably the works of Cicero; but that could not be extensively matched in surviving works of art. Elsewhere (‘Attending to the Veristic Sculptural Portrait’), Baker takes a careful look at the ‘warts and all’ style of ancient portraiture—which modern scholarship tends to associate with the Republican rather than imperial period—and considers how it was adopted in eighteenth-century image-making. But this style is infinitely less common than the imperial version, and Baker finds (p. 57) it often used for those sitters who had particular antiquarian interests (i.e., it appears to have had a cultural rather than a political significance).
52 Hollis’s use of the cap and daggers elsewhere to proclaim his commitment to liberty: Hanford, ‘ “Ut spargam”’, 171 (on radical book covers); Ayres (ed.), Harvard Divided, 154–55. The original Roman coin (RRC 508.3) was adopted in numerous modern campaigns against tyranny (see Burns et al., Valerio Belli Vicentino, 369; Bresler, Between Ancient and All’Antica, 151).
53 Marsden (ed.), Victoria and Albert, 70–71.
54 Quoted by Prown, ‘Benjamin West’, 31.
55 McNairn, Behold the Hero, 91–108; Paley, ‘George Romney’s Death of General Wolfe’. Romney’s painting (1763) is now lost, Penny’s (also 1763) is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, with a smaller version at Petworth House (‘painfully feeble’ according to Schama, Dead Certainties, 28). Roman versus modern dress had already been an issue in Rysbrack’s different early eighteenth-century marble portrayals of the architect James Gibbs: Baker, Marble Index, 92–94.
56 The context of West’s painting, and the different reactions (from Pitt to Reynolds): Schama, Dead Certainties, 1–39; McNairn, Behold the Hero, 125–43 (Pitt, p. 127); Miller, Three Deaths, 40–43 (Pitt, p. 42).
57 Galt, Life, Studies and Works, 45–51.
58 Voltaire, Letters, 51; this is the main theme of Ayres, Classical Culture.
59 Princeton University, MS Kane 44. Further discussion: Ferguson, ‘Iconography’; Stirnemann, ‘Inquiries’.
60 There were all kinds of variations on this theme. One of the most intriguing is that of the ‘Roman Academy’ of humanists, with Pomponio Leto at its head, who took their admiration and imitation of ancient culture to the extent of dressing up as Romans and celebrating pagan Roman festivals: Beer, ‘The Roman Academy’.
61 Useful up-to-date reviews of the development of Renaissance portraiture: Syson, ‘Witnessing Faces’; Rubin, ‘Understanding Renaissance Portraiture’.
62 The portraits of Giovanni and Piero: Syson, ‘Witnessing Faces’, 13–15, and pp. 166–68 in the same exhibition catalogue (Christiansen and Weppelmann (eds), Renaissance Portrait); and Eredità del Magnifico, 44–46. The context of the artist’s overall output: Caglioti, ‘Mino da Fiesole’.
63 Introduction to the Renaissance medal: Scher (ed.), Currency of Fame (with stunning illustrations); more briefly, and focussed on Italy, Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 111–22. Major catalogues include Attwood, Italian Medals; Pollard, Renaissance Medals.
64 The letter to Leonello d’Este was written in 1446 by the humanist Flavio Biondo (Nogara, Scritti inediti, 159–60); brief commentary by Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 113–14. Filarete’s reflections: Treatise 1, 45 (original manuscript: Lib. IV, Magl., fol. 25v), with discussion of the practice more widely by Hub, ‘Founding an Ideal City’, 32–39.
1 The best discussion of these tazze (with full reference to earlier studies) is the collection of essays in Siemon (ed.), Silver Caesars. The gilding is not original, but was added in the nineteenth century (Alcorn and Schroder, ‘The Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History’, 154).
2 Triumphal celebrations as central to Roman political power and prestige, imitated by Renaissance dynasts and artists: Beard, Roman Triumph. The consistency in the placing of triumphal scenes in the final position in each series is a clear sign of the systematic design behind the tazze (Beard, ‘Suetonius, the Silver Caesars’, 41–42).
3 Suetonius, Galba 4.
4 Suetonius, Nero 25; Julius Caesar 37.
5 Siemon, ‘Renaissance Intellectual Culture’, 46–50. The clearest versions of the relevant prints by Ligorio are included in the album of de’ Musi, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae.
6 BMCRE 1, 245, no. 236.
7 An excellent recent discussion of the ‘Twelve Caesars’: Christian, ‘Caesars, Twelve’, with further bibliography. Important earlier studies, on which I draw: Ladendorf, Antikenstudium; Stupperich ‘Die zwölf Caesaren’; Wegner, ‘Bildnisreihen’; Fittschen, Bildnisgalerie, 65–85
8 Martin, The Decorations, 100–131. One inspiration for the design was Jan Casper Gevartius, who had been composing a modern version of Suetonius for the Habsburgs (p. 107), and produced an illustrated record of the occasion. More recent discussion: Knaap and Putnam (eds), Art, Music, and Spectacle.
9 The earliest sculptural prototypes in the fifteenth century: below, pp. 130–31.
10 Cardinal Grimani seems to have been assembling such a line-up of emperors (though not the Suetonian Twelve) from what he believed to be ancient specimens, of which his famous ‘Vitellius’ was a part: Perry, ‘Cardinal Domenico Grimani’s Legacy’, 234–38.
11 Fittschen, Bildnisgalerie, 64 (‘Aus England sind mir Zwölf-Kaiser-Serien bisher nicht bekannt worden’, and he goes on to wonder if the lack was a consequence of the English hatred of absolutism). In fact, there are (or were) many sets: for example, at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, where in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century the decoration included both paintings and two sets of busts of the Twelve Caesars (Groos (ed.), Diary of Baron Waldstein, 81–87; Hentzner, Travels in England, 38; Cole, ‘Theobalds, Hertfordshire’, esp. 102–3; Williams, ‘Collecting and Religion’, 171–72); at Goodnestone Park in Kent, with its ‘colossal busts of the twelve Caesars’ in the garden (Neale, Views of the Seats, sv Goodnestone, Kent); and Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire (below, p. 125). Bolsover Castle is another good example (above, p. 14), but with only eight Caesars; so too the set acquired for Euston Hall (below, p. 127). Further imperial line-ups are dug out by Catherine Daunt in her doctoral thesis, Portrait Sets, 40–41, 47–49. The prominence of the Caesars in Renaissance England: Hopkins, Cultural Uses, 1–2.
12 The seventeenth-century set in the Villa Borghese, originally in the Palazzo Borghese in central Rome, moved to the Villa in the 1830s: Moreno and Stefani, Borghese Gallery, 129. The Della Porta busts, acquired by the Borghese family in 1609: Ioele, Prima di Bernini, 16–23, 194–95 (trying also to disentangle the different sets of Caesars made in the Della Porta workshop); Moreno and Stefani, Borghese Gallery, 59. The imperial busts in the Farnese palace: Jestaz, L’Inventaire, vol. 3, 185; Riebesell, ‘Guglielmo della Porta’; the Carracci copies of Titian’s emperors, paired with imperial busts: Jestaz, L’Inventaire, vol. 3, 132; Robertson, ‘Artistic Patronage’, 369–70. A further selection of Italian examples: Desmas and Freddolini, ‘Sculptures in the Palace’, 271–72.
13 https://
14 Bauer and Haupt, ‘Das Kunstkammerinventar ‘, nos 1745, 1763.
15 https://
16 Strada, Imperatorum Romanorum, introduction by the publisher, Andreas Gesner (recommending it for ‘those who on account of their age or poor eyesight are put off by smaller images’). This edition (which had pirated Strada’s text) extends beyond the Twelve Caesars to include 118 rulers, from Julius Caesar to Charles V.
17 Wardropper, Limoges Enamels, 38–39. Restorations have changed the line-up on the casket; there are, for example, now three images of Vitellius, reduplicated in the nineteenth century.
18 ‘Middling Class’: letter to Thomas Bentley, 23 August 1772 (Wedgwood Museum Archive, E 25–18392, available online at http://
19 Lessmann and König-Lein, Wachsarbeiten, 76–88. An antidote to my, perhaps unfairly negative, view of the art of waxworks: Panzanelli (ed.), Ephemeral Bodies.
20 This was Sir John Finch commissioning Caesars for his patron, the Earl of Arlington: Jacobsen, Luxury and Power, 125, drawing on National Archive documents, State Papers 98/10, FO 40; 98/11, FO 173 (1669 and 1670). Jacobsen also quotes the diarist John Evelyn’s unfavourable reaction to the busts—not unfair, to judge from the surviving pair from the set, on display at the Ancient House Museum, Thetford. (My thanks to Oliver Bone, of Thetford and King’s Lynn Museums, for providing details of their colourful local history, including a period outside the town’s theatre, welcoming the audience.)
21 Christian, ‘Caesars, Twelve’, 155, 156.
22 Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 48–83; Tite, Manuscript Library; Kuhns, Cotton’s Library.
23 Paul, The Borghese Collections, 24.
24 The twenty-four busts are nineteenth-century works by Leone Clerici (twelve Greeks, plus twelve Romans, of whom seven are emperors, good and bad): Handbook, 16–17. (My thanks to Deirdre E. Donohue and Vincenzo Rutigliano of the NYPL for finding this information for me.)
25 Tite, Manuscript Library, 92, fig. 33.
26 Middeldorf, ‘Die zwölf Caesaren’; Caglioti, ‘Fifteenth-Century Reliefs’ (correcting some of Middeldorf’s conclusions and citing the relevant fifteenth-century documents); more briefly, Fittschen, Bildnisgalerie, 65. Although not in a coin-like format, it has often been assumed that Desiderio’s Julius Caesar (Fig. 2.4f) was originally one of a series of twelve, though the evidence is shaky.
27 Errors at, for example, the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: http://
28 Lessman and König-Lein, Wachsarbeiten, 76.
29 Boch, Descriptio publicae gratulationis, 124–28, available online at http://
30 Fulvio’s ‘gaps’: see further below, p. 253.
31 Oldenbourg, ‘Die niederländischen Imperatorenbilder’; Jonckheere, Portraits, 115–18. Vitellius is by Hendrick Goltzius, no relation of Hubert; Otho’s artist is unknown (Gerard van Honthorst and Abraham Bloemaert have been suggested).
32 Koeppe (ed.), Art of the Royal Court, 260–61.
33 The plan of this arrangement, which goes back to the late eighteenth century: I Borghese e l’antico, 204–5.
34 Fittschen, Bildnisgalerie, esp. 17–39. It was a similar principle of ‘work in progress’ by which the Limoges Casket ended up with three images of Vitellius among its Twelve Caesars (Fig. 4.5, with n. 17 above).
35 The date and authenticity of individual pieces: Stuart Jones (ed.), Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures … Museo Capitolino, 186–214; Fittschen and Zanker, Katalog der römischen Porträts (more up-to-date, but the portraits of the room are scattered through the whole catalogue, rather than treated in a single chapter).
36 The origin and early history of the museum: Arata, ‘La nascita’; Benedetti, Il Palazzo Nuovo; Parisi Presicce ‘Nascita e fortuna’; Minor, Culture of Architecture, 190–215; Paul, ‘Capitoline Museum’; Collins, ‘A Nation of Statues’, 189–98; The role of Capponi is documented in his diary: Franceschini and Vernesi (eds), Statue di Campidoglio. The definition of the museum’s purpose is written into the contract for the purchase of sculptures for it in 1733, quoted in Paul, ‘Capitoline Museum’, 24.
37 Bottari and Foggini, Museo Capitolino (originally published in 1748; my description is based on the edition of 1820).
38 The comparison between Trajan and Washington: Griffin (ed.), Remains, 353. The blurry line between art and power: Mementoes, 34. Agrippina misidentified: Wilson, Journal, 33.
39 Marlowe, Shaky Ground, 15: ‘a time capsule of a different era’s construction of the past’.
40 The disputes: Franceschini and Vernesi (eds), Statue di Campidoglio, 40–41 (Claudius); 50 (Pompey).
41 The changing composition of the room up to the early twentieth century can be tracked through: Gaddi, Roma nobilitata, 194–96; Locatelli, Museo Capitolino 45–53; Murray’s Handbook for Travellers (1843), 433; Murray’s Handbook for Travellers (1853), 200; Murray’s Handbook of Rome, 51; Stuart Jones (ed.), Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures … Museo Capitolino, 186–214 (with full details of the portraits on the shelves around 1910). My own observations in the museum confirm the idea of on-going flux. In 2017, the information panels intended to help the visitor work out who is who, giving a key to each head, proved a treacherous guide. In a few crucial places, the key did not match the current arrangement: where, for example, Livia was supposed to be, there was a head of Augustus.
42 In 1736, Gaddi, Roma nobilitata, 194 described its position as ‘in sight of the door’ (nell’prospetto dell’ingresso), so probably central; in 1750, Locatelli, Museo Capitolino, 46 placed it ‘between the two widows’ (fra le due finestre); Stuart Jones, Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures … Museo Capitolino, 276 notes that it remained in the Room of the Emperors until 1817.
43 This figure is now identified as an anonymous athlete, or a young man, resting his foot on a rock: Stuart Jones (ed.), Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures … Museo Capitolino, 288. It is described as being ‘in the centre of the room’ (nel mezzo della stanza) by Locatelli, Museo Capitolino, 47. The changing identification of these statues causes much confusion. Minor, Culture of Architecture, 202, 206–8 mistakes the Antinoos in the Room of the Emperors for the now far more famous Capitoline Antinoos, and misinterprets a 1780 drawing accordingly (p. 206). But, to add to the confusion, it seems that the Capitoline Antinoos had briefly been housed in the Room of the Emperors, before being moved by Capponi to the Great Hall (see Gaddi, Roma nobilitata, 194; Franceschini and Vernesi (eds), Statue di Campidoglio, 124).
44 The Venus: Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 318–20. The Venus replacing ‘Antinoos’, and followed by ‘Agrippina’: Stuart Jones (ed.), Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures … Museo Capitolino, 288, 215.
45 The theatre: Borys, Vincenzo Scamozzi, 160–67. The cultural context of Sabbioneta and its theatre: Besutti, ‘Musiche e scene’, and below, p. 180.
46 The story of these emperors, and the current locations of those remaining from earlier series, is being investigated by an Oxford research group: https://
47 Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson; in Roberts’s parody, Zuleika in Cambridge, she in fact finds Cambridge more resistant to her charms.
48 Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, 9–10.
49 The Times 19 February 2019 (letter from Will Wyatt, quoting the sculptor Michael Black—who was fond of a joke).
50 Siemon (ed.), Silver Caesars: esp. Siemon, ‘Tracing the Origin’; Salomon, ‘The Dodici Tazzoni’; Alcorn and Schroder, ‘The Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History’.
51 The misidentifications in greater detail: Beard, ‘Suetonius, the Silver Caesars’. The scenes had been confidently identified as Domitianic since at least the late nineteenth century: Darcel (ed.), Collection Spitzer, 24 (though a scratched ‘VESPASIANUS’ on the base suggests that at some point others had other ideas).
52 Suetonius, Tiberius 20.
53 Suetonius, Tiberius 6, 48 and 9.
54 Suetonius, Caligula 19; Domitian 1.
55 McFadden, ‘An Aldobrandini Tazza’: ‘A cooperative action of the part of three museums … has restored the figures to their proper bowls’ (p. 51); http://
1 In working on this chapter I have been very grateful for exchanges and discussion with Frances Coulter, who is preparing a longer study on Titian’s Caesars and has generously shared her great expertise. The Darby collection and Brett: Cottrell, ‘Art Treasures’, with references to Wellington, pp. 633 and 640. Cottrell draws on Brett’s notes in the Private Catalogue of the Darby Collection, of which there is a copy in the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Archive (E 1980. 1202); under the heading ‘Titian The Caesars’, Brett hypes the quality of the six paintings (‘These Noble Pictures are … as works of Art unsurpassed’). My thanks to Georgina Grant of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum for providing me with a copy of the relevant sections of the Private Catalogue. How these relate to the six Caesars that Brett is supposed to have sold to the late king of Holland, The Daily News 2 April 1864, 2, is unclear to me! But confusion is endemic around these paintings: Wethey, Paintings of Titian, 239, following Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, 423 identify the owner as Abraham Hume, not Abraham Darby.
2 Fundamental recent discussions of these paintings: Wethey, Paintings of Titian, 235–40; in much greater detail, Zeitz, Tizian, 59–103. The Alcázar fire: Stewart, Madrid, 81–82 (a brief but chilling account: ‘only a handful of palace servants dying in the blaze’), with Bottineau, ‘L’Alcázar’, 150 (citing the even briefer eye-witness account of the French painter Jean Ranc, in whose palace studio the blaze began).
3 The Literary Gazette, 20 March 1841, 187–88; with Brett in the Private Catalogue, n. 1 above.
4 National Review, ‘The Manchester Exhibition’, 5 (July 1857) 197–222, quotation p. 202 (George Richmond, writing anonymously).
5 Christies sale, 8 June 1867, lots 127–32, under the heading, ‘The following pictures were exhibited at Manchester in 1857’. One of the set, Tiberius, bought for four guineas by James Carnegie in 1867, was sold again at Christie’s in 2014 as ‘after Tiziano Vecellio’: https://
6 Morning Post 6 November 1829, 3; North Wales Chronicle 12 November 1829, 2; Caledonian Mercury 14 November 1829, 2, and elsewhere. The £8000: Northcote, Titian, 171.
7 There were other fantasies of their survival outside the United Kingdom. One erroneous early twentieth- century idea held that versions in Munich (likewise copies) were in fact the originals: Wielandt, ‘Die verschollenen Imperatoren-Bilder’ (proposing the idea), dismissed by Wethey, Paintings of Titian, 238, and others.
8 The closest rival is probably Antonio Tempesta’s Twelve Caesars on Horseback (1596), which were not only very popular as prints but were copied into different media (Peacock, Stage Designs, 281–82, noting their inspiration behind some of Inigo Jones’s theatrical costumes; four copies in paint at Anglesey Abbey in eastern England, http://
9 de Bellaigue, French Porcelain, no. 361.
10 It goes by many modern titles, including also ‘Gabinetto dei Cesari’ and ‘Sala dei Cesari’.
11 The renovation: Cottafavi, ‘Cronaca’, 622–23. The copies: L’Occaso, Museo di Palazzo Ducale, 231–33.
12 Useful introductions to the development of the Ducal Palace at Mantua, to the ‘Trojan Suite’, and to the patronage of Federico (among a vast bibliography): Chambers and Martineau (eds), Splendours; Furlotti and Rebecchini, Art of Mantua. In the notes that follow I am necessarily highly selective in picking out important discussions and useful starting places on particular Mantuan themes.
13 The Gonzaga collections of antiquities: Brown and Ventura, ‘Le raccolte’; Rausa, ‘ “Li disegni”’. For an ancient statue of ‘Faustina’, which was the subject of a tug-of-love battle between Isabella d’Este and Mantegna, see below, p. 237.
14 Dolce, Dialogo, 59: ‘i veri Cesari e non pitture’ (also saying that huge numbers of people went to Mantua, just to see them).
15 Zeitz, Tizian, 78–79.
16 ‘Molto belle, e belle in modo <or di sorte> che non si puo far più nè tanto’ (Very fine, and fine in a way that can neither be bettered nor equalled); quoted by Zeitz, Tizian, 101, with the context in Perini (ed.), Gli scritti, 162. The history of these annotations, and the question of which of the Carracci was the author: Dempsey, ‘Carracci Postille’; Loh, Still Lives, 28–29, 239 n. 64 (reaching different conclusions).
17 The layout of the room: Koering, ‘Le Prince et ses modèles’ and Le Prince, 282–95, in addition to Zeitz, Tizian, 65–100. Frances Coulter’s excellent digital reconstructions can be found at https://
18 The career of Giulio Romano: Hartt, Giulio Romano, with the essays in the exhibition catalogue Giulio Romano. Shakespeare: Winter’s Tale, Act 5, scene 2, line 96.
19 ‘Messer Tiziano, mio amico carissimo’, from Federico to Titian, 26 March 1537. The letters are collected and discussed in Bodart, Tiziano, 149–56, with documents nos. 253–304; Zeitz, Tizian, 61–65, with documents nos. 252–306.
20 Recent arguments for the identification of horsemen as emperors: Berzaghi, ‘Nota per il gabinetto’, 246–47; Coulter, ‘Supporting Titian’s Emperors’.
21 The Hampton Court panels: Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, nos 117 and 118; Whitaker and Clayton, Art of Italy, no. 39 (who draw attention among other things to signs of hasty execution). Another scene at Hampton Court of the sacrifice of a goat (with a related preliminary drawing in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, 1973.47.1) seems to be related to the Camerino, but (see below, p. 166 and n33) it is hard to know where exactly it might have fitted: Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, no. 119. The Louvre painting: Hartt, Giulio Romano, 174–75.
22 The pair at Hampton Court: Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, nos 120 and 121; Whitaker and Clayton, Art of Italy, no. 39. The trio at Marseille: Peintures Italiennes, no. 73. Lapenta and Morselli (eds), Collezioni Gonzaga, 189–92 discuss and illustrate all except the horseman and Victory at Narford Hall, whose current owners have confirmed their location. My thanks to Alfred Cohen of the Trafalgar Gallery, London, for providing full detail of the Gallery’s horseman.
23 The Gonzaga inventory: Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 89–136; Morselli (ed.), Collezioni Gonzaga, 237–508 (with illustrations and further commentary in Lapenta and Morselli (eds), Collezioni Gonzaga). The inventory of the property of Charles I: Millar (ed.), Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue and Inventories and Valuations. (Both of the inventories of Charles I, with useful commentary, can be accessed online at https://
24 The inventory, compiled by Johann-Baptist Fickler, diligent tutor of one of Albrecht’s successors: Diemer (ed.), Das Inventar; with Hartt, Giulio Romano, 170–76; Diemer et al. (eds), Münchner Kunstkammer, vol. 2, nos 2600, 2610, 2618, 2626, 2632, 2639, 2646, 2653, 2660, 2667, 2678, 2683. The idea of a ‘mini-Mantua’: Diemer and Diemer, ‘Mantua in Bayern?’; Jansen, Jacopo Strada, 611–13. The role of the Kunstkammer: Pilaski Kaliardos, Munich Kunstkammer.
25 The disputed attribution of these drawings: Verheyen, ‘Jacopo Strada’s Mantuan Drawings’ (considering them the work of Strada himself); Busch, Studien, 204–5, 342 n. 90 (the first to identify them as Andreasi’s). The career of Andreasi: Harprath, ‘Ippolito Andreasi’. Jansen, Jacopo Strada, esp.701–8 makes clear that Strada’s interest in the art and architecture of the Gonzaga extended much further than the Camerino.
26 Suetonius, Tiberius 27. The British Museum holds a preliminary sketch of another ‘story’, accompanying the portrait of Caligula (Inv. 1959,1214.1): Koering Le Prince, 287–88 and Berzaghi, ‘Nota per il gabinetto’, 245–46 (offering different views of which passage of Suetonius lies behind it).
27 It is an indication of the confusion surrounding the decoration of this room that in most accounts the orientation is given wrongly (what is, in fact, the west wall is dubbed the north, and so on). I am using the correct, rather than conventional, directions—following Koering and Coulter.
28 The statuette from Vienna: Giulio Romano, 403. It is hard to detect a theme here. On the opposite (east) wall, however, the statuettes of the Trojan hero Paris, with Venus, Minerva and Juno add up to a Judgement of Paris: Koering, Le Prince, 285–86.
29 Of the other horsemen, the figure on the far left matches the one in the Trafalgar Gallery, London; the figure on the far right matches one of those at Hampton Court.
30 The usual view is that the illustrations in Fulvio’s book were the work of the artist Ugo da Carpi, and they were much copied later: Servolini, ‘Ugo da Carpi’.
31 The full line-up on the west wall is as follows. Upper level, left to right: (1) ‘Ti(berius) Claudius Caesar Aug(ustus) P(ontifex) M(aximus) P(ater) P(atriae)’ (Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Chief Priest father of his country), i.e., the emperor Claudius (those scholars who have referred to this medallion have usually misread ‘AUG PM’ as the meaningless ‘AUDEM’, and the entry in Morselli (ed.), Gonzaga.… Le raccolte, 173 wrongly assumes that the wording identifies the horseman not the figure in the medallion); (2) ‘Domitius Neronis Imp(eratoris) Pater’ (Domitius the father of the Emperor Nero); (3) ‘L(ucius) Silvius Otho Vthonis Imper(atoris) Pater’ (Lucius Silvius Otho the father of the emperor Otho) replicating the error ‘V’ for ‘O’ in the original source; (4) ‘L(ucius) Vitellius Vitellii Imp(eratoris) Pater’ (Lucius Vitellius the father of the emperor Vitellius). Lower level, left to right: (1) not clearly decipherable, though ‘uxor’ (wife) is legible; the closest match is ‘Livia Medullina’, betrothed to Claudius but died on her wedding day; (2) blank; (3) ‘Albia Terentia Othonis Imp(eratoris) Mater’ (Albia Terentia the mother of the emperor Otho); (4) ‘Sextilia A(uli) Vitellii Imp(eratoris) Mater’ (Sextilia the mother of the emperor Aulus Vitellius).
32 The full line-up under Augustus is as follows. Upper level, left to right: (1) ‘Livia Drusilla Augusti Uxor’ (Livia Drusilla, the wife of Augustus); (2) ‘Tiberius Nero Tiberii Imper(atoris) Pater’ (Tiberius Nero, the father of the emperor Tiberius). Lower level, left to right: (1) ‘… Scribonia F Agripp<a>e Ux(or)’, originally ‘Iulia Augus(ti) ex Scribonia F(ilia) Agripp<a>e Ux(or)’ (Julia the daughter of Augustus by Scribonia, the wife of Agrippa), misread by Zeitz, Tizian, 98 and Koering, Le Prince 286; (2) ‘Livilla Drusi Tiberii F(ilii) Uxor’ (Livilla, the wife of Drusus, the son of Tiberius). The death of Drusus: Tacitus, Annals 4, 3–8. The grim end of Livilla: Dio, Roman History 58, 11, 7.
33 The Triumph scene is 1.7 m wide; the horsemen c. 0.5 m each; and the sacrifice of a goat, thought to be another of the ‘stories’ (above, n. 21), 0.66 m. If we add to these the (lost) ‘story’ accompanying Vitellius, and the borders between each painting, the total width required is over five metres. At this point we can do no more than speculate. The fact that Vitellius’s parents are in medallions on the adjacent wall might suggest that, despite Strada’s notes (below, n. 35) and the implications of the Munich inventory, there was no horseman under Vitellius, or that there was no ‘story’ to accompany Vitellius. Or possibly the surviving painting of the sacrifice of a goat from Hampton Court, often linked to the life of Domitian (Hartt, Giulio Romano, 175) did not belong in the room at all (where there was no portrait of Domitian). The best recent review of these puzzles, and various solutions: Berzaghi, ‘Nota per il gabinetto’.
34 Claudius identified as Caesar: Millar (ed.), Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue, 43, and Inventories and Valuations, 328. The story of the ‘mayor’ is drawn from Tacitus, Annals 6, 11, 3. The inventories show that at least by 1598 the ‘wrong’ ‘stories’ had been paired with the ‘wrong’ emperors.
35 Strada’s notes: Munich, Hauptstaatsarchiv, Libri Antiquitatum, 4852, fol. 167; published in Verheyen, ‘Jacopo Strada’s Mantuan Drawings’, 64: ‘Dodici imperadori, sopradetti, a cavallo’ (Twelve emperors aforementioned, on horseback) (my italics), cited by Verheyen as Libri Antiquitatum, vol. 2). The 1627 inventory: Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 92; Morselli (ed.), Collezioni Gonzaga, 269: ‘Dieci altri quadri dipintovi un Imperator per quadro a cavallo’ (Ten other panels, depicting one emperor per panel on horseback) (my italics). The eleven in the inventory of Charles I’s property: Millar (ed.), Inventories and Valuations, 270. (A single ‘mounted emperor’ mentioned elsewhere in the Gonzaga inventories, though not attributed to Giulio Romano (Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 97; Morselli (ed.), Collezioni Gonzaga, 278) may or may not help partly to resolve the discrepancy. Quite how the figure of the Victory is to be computed here is only a further complication.
36 Vasari, Vite, 834 (‘the twelve portraits of the emperors which Titian painted’). Strada (see n. 35) also refers to ‘twelve’ emperors. The inventories differ: Millar (ed.), Inventories and Valuations, 270 records ‘twelve’ (though one manuscript copy emends this to ‘eleven’: British Library, Harley MS 4898, f 502); the 1627 inventory made in Mantua correctly notes ‘eleven’ (Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 89; Morselli (ed.), Collezioni Gonzaga, 268); the correspondence connected with the sale to the agents of Charles I is inconsistent between ‘twelve’ and ‘eleven plus one’ (Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 139).
37 Hartt, Giulio Romano, 170, 176–77.
38 ‘Giulio Romano’s’ Domitian: Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 90; Morselli (ed.), Collezioni Gonzaga, 268 (‘another similar painting with the figure of an emperor, by the hand of Giulio Romano’). Fetti’s Domitian: Morselli in Safarik (ed.), Domenico Fetti, 260, 264–65. Every series of copies included a Domitian, whether new inventions or copies of copies; see Fig. 5.10.
39 Julius Caesar (Suetonius, Julius Caesar 7): Diemer et al. (eds), Münchner Kunstkammer, vol. 2, no. 2632; Hartt, Giulio Romano, 170, 174 (misidentifying the scene). Augustus (Suetonius, Augustus 94): Hartt, Giulio Romano,171–72; Diemer et al. (eds.), Münchner Kunstkammer, vol 2, no. 2610; with a preliminary sketch half in Windsor Royal Library, half in the Albertina, Vienna: Chambers and Martineau (eds), Splendours, 191.
40 In this I follow Koering, Le Prince, 285. Arasse, Décors, 249–50 n. 163 makes a similar point on the eight emperors of Mantegna in the Camera picta.
41 Pocock, Barbarism, 127–50.
42 Silver, Marketing Maximilian, esp. chaps. 2 and 3; Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 306–22.
43 Panvinio, Fasti. The ‘bootleg’: McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio, 30–33; and, more favourable to Strada (the notion of ‘pirating’ being more fluid then than now; see above, Chap. 4, n. 16): Bauer, Invention of Papal History, 52–53; Jansen, Jacopo Strada, 196–99. Other attempts to link ancient Roman to modern history include Fulvio’s Illustrium imagines, which started with Janus and finished with the Holy Roman emperor Conrad, who died in 918 CE, and Konrad Peutinger’s project to publish a compendium of emperors, from Julius Caesar to Maximilian himself (Silver, Marketing Maximilian, 77–78; Jecmen and Spira, Imperial Augsburg, 49–51).
44 Federico as the model for Augustus: Zeitz, Tizian, 94–100. But see, for example, RRC 494, 529, showing a bearded Octavian, matching the (copies of) Titian’s Augustus.
45 Koering, Le Prince, 273–82 (noting the rhyme); more briefly, Hartt, Giulio Romano, 178–79.
46 Ferrari (ed.), Collezioni Gonzaga (the Camerino: p. 189).
47 Bodart, Tiziano, document 304; Zeitz, Tizian, document 306.
48 The circumstances and context of the acquisition: Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga; Brotton, Sale, 107–44; Anderson, Flemish Merchant.
49 The history of the ‘Logion Serato’: Furlotti and Rebecchini, Art of Mantua, 236–40 (it is wrongly believed by Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 125 to be a new name for the Camerino). The dispersal of the paintings around the Ducal Palace: Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 89–90, 92, 97, 115; Morselli (ed.), Collezioni Gonzaga, 268–69, 278, 295.
50 Anderson, Flemish Merchant attempts to draw a more nuanced picture of Nys. The damage by mercury: Wilson, Nicholas Lanier, 130–31.
51 The eighteenth-century ‘remnant’: Keysler, Travels, 116–17. The bizarre claim about the destruction of the paintings: Richter (ed.), Lives, 47 (‘Mrs Jonathan Foster’ being responsible for the notes). It is possible that some of Giulio Romano’s ‘stories’ did not end up in England, as not all can be traced in the inventories of Charles I’s collection.
52 The remedies: R. Symonds, British Library, Egerton MS 1636, fol. 30, quoted by Wilson, Nicholas Lanier, 131. The damaged painting: Millar (ed.), Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue, 174 (it is listed, in a series of damaged Mantuan paintings, as ‘utterlie spoyled by quicksilver’).
53 The original document (The National Archive, Kew, Surrey, LC 5/132 f. 306) is online at: http://
54 Puget de la Serre, Histoire (no page numbers); the relevant passage is quoted by Wilks, ‘Paying Special Attention’, 158–59. Again, the documentation does not quite add up. Puget de la Serre implies that the emperors were all together in a single location, but that is clearly contradicted by the other evidence, including the roughly contemporary inventories.
55 Otho: Millar (ed.), Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue, 194; Inventories and Valuations, 66.
56 Millar (ed.), Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue, 226–27 (an inventory published here as an appendix, but not by the hand of van der Doort himself).
57 Hercules and Charles: Millar (ed.), Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue, 226, 227.
58 The direct sources for this image: Raatschen, ‘Van Dyck’s Charles I’; Howarth, Images of Rule. 141–45.
59 The precise reconstruction of the gallery involves conjecture. But Wilks, ‘Paying Special Attention’ confirms beyond serious doubt the basic articulation of the gallery and the position of Titian’s emperors, contra Howarth, Images of Rule, 141, who imagines the ‘enfilade’ leading up to the portrait of Charles.
60 The links between Charles’s claims of divine sanction and the role of Hercules in this gallery and elsewhere: Hennen, ‘Karl zu Pferde’, 47, 83; Wilks, ‘Paying Special Attention’, 159–60.
61 The disposal of the ‘king’s goods’: Brotton, Sale, 210–312; Haskell, King’s Pictures, 137–69.
62 The sale, and subsequent fate, of the horsemen: Shearman, Early Italian Pictures, 123–24 (with similar information on Giulio Romano’s ‘stories’, some of which returned to the royal collection, although in the case of the Otho panel subsequently lost again, pp 125–26). The ‘restoration campaign’ in general: Brotton, Sale, 313–51; Haskell, King’s Pictures, 171–93.
63 The complex negotiations: Brown and Elliott (eds.), Sale of the Century, with some key documents translated and discussed by Brotton and McGrath, ‘Spanish Acquisition’.
64 The first more negative assessment: Brown and Elliott (eds.), Sale of the Century, 285–86 (reprinting a memorandum of 8 August 1651 in Archivo de la Casa de Alba, Caja 182–195: ‘The Twelve emperors by the hand of Titian … six of which are in very bad condition. And the one of the emperor Vitellius entirely lost . .’ The changed view is reflected in a letter of 24 November 1651 from the same archive (Caja 182–176), translated in Brotton and McGrath, ‘Spanish Acquisition’, 13 (with the original Spanish in Brown and Elliott (eds), Sale of the Century, 282).
65 The history of the palace: Brown and Elliott, Palace for a King (with discussion of the paintings commissioned for it, pp. 105–40); Barghahn, Philip IV and the ‘Golden House’, 151–401 (reconstructing in detail the hang of the paintings). Little of the Buen Retiro survives; some remaining rooms are part of the Prado museum complex.
66 The layout of the gallery: Bottineau, ‘L’Alcázar’, publishing the inventory of 1686 (esp. 150–51, for the ‘Titians’); Orso, Philip IV, 144–53; Vázquez-Manassero, ‘Twelve Caesars’ Representations’, esp. 656–58.
67 There is no complete or accurate list of copies, but there is a useful register of many, with essential documentation in Wethey, Paintings of Titian, 237–40; Zimmer, ‘Aus den Sammlungen’, 12–16; 26–27. For ‘faces’ literally, see the set of twelve late sixteenth-century copies of emperors from the collection of Schloss Ambras in Austria which cuts down Titian’s three-quarter figures to ‘face-only’: Haag (ed.), All’Antica, 214–17.
68 Lamo, Discorso, 77 (‘offerendo tutti i dodici ritratti al Marchese’—my italics), who also remarks on the style. The work of Campi and his extended family: I Campi.
69 Coulter, ‘Drawing Titian’s “Caesars”’ (having been seen a century and a half earlier, and partially published in Morbio, ‘Notizie’). They obviously relate in some way—though exactly how is unclear—to a very similar, but clearly ‘squared’ (for copying), set of six drawings of Titian’s Julius Caesar, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho and Vitellius; these remained unsold at auction at Gros & Delettrez, Paris, 18 May 2009, lots 29 A–C (attributed to the workshop of Giulio Romano).
70 Ferdinand and the Spanish collections: Lamo, Discorso, 78. The (lost) paintings for the junior branches of the Gonzaga family: Sartori, ‘La copia’. Some of the documentation is collected in Ronchini, ‘Bernardino Campi’, esp. 71–72—though it raises some of the usual problems (why, for example, did Ferrante II of Guastalla direct Campi to the Emperors at Sabbioneta as his model, if Campi had actually painted those, and had his own templates anyway?). The heads of a surviving series of emperors painted by Campi and his workshop in the Palazzo Giardino at Sabbioneta certainly reflect the facial features of members of Titian’s series, though on very different bodies and sometimes attaching the ‘wrong’ heads to the ‘wrong’ emperors (Sartori, ‘La copia’, 21–24).
71 The several copies in Mantua: Rebecchini, Private Collectors, publishing local inventories and wills in which paintings of ‘Twelve Caesars’ are listed, sometimes explicitly attributed to Titian (see App. 4, I, 139; 4, II, 34; 6, II; 6, III, 11; 6, V, 1; 6, V, 210; 6, VI, 1). The evidence for the set commissioned for Pérez by Duke Guglielmo: Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 89.
72 The set commissioned by Maximilian II: Zimmer, Aus den Sammlungen, 20, 43–47. The Farnese inventory, see Jestaz, L’Inventaire, vol. 3, 132. A possible sixteenth-century source of these paintings: Robertson, ‘Artistic Patronage’, 370.
73 This is attested in a letter from Daniel Nys on 2 October 1627 (published in Luzio, Galleria dei Gonzaga, 147), with Anderson, Flemish Merchant, 130–31. Nys reports that the duke ‘wants to send a painter to copy the paintings of the gallery’ (voel mandare un pittore a posta per copiare li quadri della galleria), but insists that there are good artists in Venice whom he can get to do the job.
74 The text of the letter: Voltelini, ‘Urkunden und Regesten’, no. 9433 (‘porque ya tiene otros duplicados, que le embiaron de Roma’). Further background on the collection: Delaforce, ‘Collection of Antonio Pérez’, esp. 752.
75 Those in the d’Avalos collection: I Campi, 160 and I tesori, 50–53. Those in the private collection have a documented history in Mantua, and have been in the UK since the late 1970s. The relationship between the set of copies by ‘il Padovanino’ recorded in a 1712 inventory of the Ducal Palace at Mantua and the copies made for the Gonzaga, while the paintings were awaiting shipment in Venice, is anyone’s guess: Eidelberg and Rowlands, ‘The Dispersal’, 214, 267 n. 53. The replicas that now stand in the place of the originals in the Camerino are quite separate, acquired in 1924 (see above, n. 11).
76 The history of the Munich set is predictably unfathomable. Strada is known to have had painted copies of the main elements of the Camerino made at Mantua (as well as Andreasi’s sketches); but he must have been aware that there was already a set of emperors in Munich, since out of the whole line-up of emperors he ordered only a Domitian (he presumably assumed that the Munich set was only Titian’s original Eleven—wrongly it seems, since Fickler’s Inventory (above, n. 24) registers two Domitians in the Munich collection). The documentation on this and the complex inferences involved: Verheyen, ‘Jacopo Strada’s Mantuan Drawings’, 64 (with n. 35 above); Diemer et al. (eds), Münchner Kunstkammer, vol. 2, nos 2682, 3212; Zimmer, ‘Aus den Sammlungen’, 12–14.
77 There are impossible conundra here too. As Zimmer, ‘Aus den Sammlungen’, 19–20 observes, the relevant letter (above, n. 74) makes it seem unlikely that Rudolf was seriously in the market for Pérez’s Caesars; but why were they even being considered if he had already inherited a set on the death of his father in 1576?
78 Sadeler’s career: Limouze, ‘Aegidius Sadeler, Imperial Printmaker’; Aegidius Sadeler (c. 1570–1629). These were by far the most popular printed versions of Titian’s emperors, but there were many others: for example, those of Balthasar Moncornet in the early–mid-seventeenth century; of Georg Augustus Wolfgang in the late seventeenth century; of Thomas Bakewell and Louis-Jacques Cathelin in the eighteenth. Some of these were copies of Sadeler, but some were taken independently from other painted copies of the Titians. Sadeler’s Domitian, for example, was not based on Campi’s (another clear indication that Rudolf II did not own a Campi set; see Fig. 5.10). Wolfgang does base one of his figures on Campi’s Domitian, but—in another case of mistaken identity—turns it into a Tiberius. (See British Museum, Inv. 1950,0211.189.)
79 Vertue, Vertue’s Note Book, 52.The fact that in England Titian’s series were housed separately makes the idea that they were copied as a set unlikely.
80 Worsley, ‘The “Artisan Mannerist” Style’, 91–92 sees a connection between these Caesars and the family’s interest in Italy; but, directly dependant on Sadeler, they imply no knowledge of the originals or Italy (Illustrations: https://
81 Details of the book: https://
82 Fontane, Effi Briest, 166.
83 Halsema-Kubes, ‘Bartholomeus Eggers’ keizers’. They were originally designed for another royal palace at Oranienburg, and the same models were used again for the four lead busts now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Fig. 5.15); ‘imaginative fantasies’ (phastasievollen … Dekor): Fittschen, Bildnisgalerie, 54–55.
84 Daily Mail: above, Chap. 2, n. 44. The modern memorabilia are available from https://
85 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Titian, 424.
86 The quotation: Saavedro Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe, 14 (‘No a de aver … Estatua, ni Pintura, que no cie en el pecho del Principe gloriosa emulacion’), translated as The royal politician, 15–16. These theories, in relation to the images of ancient emperors among the Spanish monarchy: Vázquez-Manassero, ‘Twelve Caesars’ Representations’, 658.
87 Agustìn, Dialogos, 18–19 (particularly interested in the appearance of Nero, as the persecutor of Peter and Paul).
88 Koering, Le Prince, 155–60 (noting how one of Giulio Romano’s ‘stories’ in the Camerino, showing Julius Caesar being inspired by the statue of Alexander the Great, acts out the whole principle of ‘exemplarity’); Bodart, Tiziano 158; Maurer, Gender, Space and Experience, 93–97 (on the wider Mantuan, and gender, context). ‘Examples’ more generally: Lyons, Exemplum.
1 The nineteenth-century verdict, ‘florid’: Visitor’s Hand-Book, 46. Worse (‘gaudy colour, bad drawing and senseless composition’): Dutton Cook, Art in England, 22, quoting also the famous quip of Horace Walpole, that it looked as if the artist ‘had spoiled it out of principle’.
2 A sympathetic account of Verrio and his work: Brett, ‘Antonio Verrio (c. 1636–1707)’; Johns, ‘ “Those Wilder Sorts of Painting”’. His work at Hampton Court in particular: Dolman, ‘Antonio Verrio and the Royal Image’.
3 The breakthrough article: Wind, ‘Julian the Apostate’; with Dolman, ‘Antonio Verrio and the Royal Image’, 22–24. The emperor himself: Bowersock, Julian.
4 Bowersock, ‘Emperor Julian on his Predecessors’; Relihan, ‘Late Arrivals’, 114–16.
5 The identification: Wind, ‘Julian the Apostate’, 127–28.
6 A detailed religious/political interpretation: Wind, ‘Julian the Apostate’, 129–32. ‘Interactive essay’: Dolman, ‘Antonio Verrio and the Royal Image’, 24.
7 The punishment of Brutus and Cassius: Dante, Inferno 34, 55–67. McLaughlin, ‘Empire, Eloquence’ is a useful overview of Renaissance disagreements on Caesar. The debate between Poggio and Guarino, with the texts: Canfora (ed.), Controversia; an English translation of an extract of Poggio’s contribution, and the whole of Guarino, with further discussion, can be found in Mortimer, Medieval and Early Modern Portrayals, 318–75.
8 Wyke, Caesar, 155.
9 de Bellaigue, French Porcelain, no. 305. The other emperors depicted are Augustus, Trajan, Septimius Severus, Constantine (plus Republicans, Scipio and Pompey; Greeks, Themistocles, Miltiades, Pericles and Alexander; Roman enemies, Hannibal and Mithradates).
10 Ancient criticisms of Caesar: above, Chap. 2, n. 6. Deare’s sculpture: Macsotay, ‘Struggle’.
11 The painting has recently been discussed briefly by Mauer, Gender, Space and Experience, 113–15. The ancient anecdote is told by, for example, Pliny, Natural History 7, 94; Dio, Roman History 41, 63, 5; and for this general theme in ancient literature, see Howley, ‘Book-Burning’, 221–22.
12 Plutarch, Pompey 80 refers to Caesar’s horror at the head (though it is his signet ring that prompts tears); Lucan, Pharsalia 9, 1055–56 is more cynical. Caesar being shown Pompey’s head is represented (with different degrees of distaste) in paintings, prints and on maiolica, by, among others, Louis-Jean François Lagrenée, Antonio Pellegrini, Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
13 Martindale, ‘Triumphs’ (still the standard work); Campbell, ‘Mantegna’s Triumph’ and Andrea Mantegna, 254–72 (sharing my own sense of the darker side of these paintings); Tosetti Grandi, Trionfi; Furlotti and Rebecchini, ‘ “Rare and Unique”’.
14 Martindale, ‘Triumphs’, 117–18.
15 The face of Caesar is heavily restored, but closely based on a copy in Vienna: Martindale, ‘Triumphs’, 157.
16 A cautious analysis of this tradition of the slave: Beard, Roman Triumph, 85–92.
17 The theme of invidia in the painter’s work: Campbell, ‘Mantegna’s Triumph’, 96 (also illustrating the design of Mantegna’s personal seal: a plausible head of Caesar). Vickers, ‘Intended Setting’ sees the point of the Latin phrase, but his conclusions are fanciful.
18 The key study of these tapestries: Campbell, ‘New Light’, with Karafel, ‘Story’. Discussion of both the Caesar and the Abraham sets: Campbell, Henry VIII, 277–97. The relevant inventory entries: Starkey (ed.), Inventory, no. 11967 (with full dimensions); Millar (ed.), Inventories and Valuations, 158.
19 The history, importance and changing fortunes of tapestry: Campbell (ed.), Tapestry in the Renaissance, 3–11; Belozerskaya, Luxury Arts, 89–133.
20 The history of sightings: Campbell, ‘New Light’, 2–3. ‘woven … to the very life’: Groos (ed.), Diary of Baron Waldstein, 149. The watercolour, by Charles Wild, is in the Royal Collection (RCIN 922151).
21 I say ‘Henry’s originals’ following the general assumption that he was the first commissioner; there is certainly no hint of any sets earlier than his.
22 Karafel in Cleland (ed.), Grand Design, nos 61 and 62 (though the precise subject of the scene is misidentified here; see below, pp. 209–10).
23 Caesar’s murder: Williams (ed.), Thomas Platter’s Travels, 202; Pompey’s: Groos (ed.), Diary of Baron Waldstein, 149.
24 Campbell, ‘New Light’, 37 (quoting the relevant documents, from the Archivio di Stato in Rome). Recent discussion of the image on this tapestry: Astington, Stage and Picture, 31–33.
25 Suetonius, Julius Caesar 81 (without the name); Plutarch, Julius Caesar 65 (adapted by Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 2, scene 3; Act 3, scene 1).
26 Campbell, ‘New Light’, 35 and Raes, De Brusselse Julius Caesar wandtapijtreeksen, 12, describe it as ‘moralising’. The full caption on the tapestry reads: ‘Datus libellus Cesari conjurationem continens / Quo non lecto venit in curia ibi in curuli sedentem / Senatus invasit tribusq et viginti vulneribus / Conodit sic ille qu terrarum orbem civili sanguine / Inpleverat tandem ipse saguine <sic> suo curiam implevit’ (A pamphlet was given to Caesar containing details of the conspiracy. He did not read it but came into the senate house; there sitting on his official chair the senate attacked him and <killed> him with twenty-three blows. Thus, the man who used to fill the whole world with the blood of his fellow-citizens, ended up filling the senate house with his own blood). This is closely based on Florus, Epitome 2, 13, 94–95: ‘libellus etiam Caesari datus.… Venit in curiam.… Ibi in curuli sedentem cum senatus invasit, tribusque et viginti volneribus.… Sic ille, qui terrarum orbem civili sanguine impleverat, tandem ipse sanguine suo curiam implevit’.
27 The technical arguments underpinning the connection between the Vatican piece and Henry’s set: Campbell, ‘New Light’, 5–6, 10–12. There are two later pieces adapting the same design: one, location unknown, auctioned at Drouot, Paris, 2 December 1988, lot 158; the other now in the French Musée National de la Renaissance, inv D2014.1.1.
28 Plutarch, Julius Caesar 35; Lucan, Pharsalia 3, 154–56, 165–68.
29 My intentionally simplified account skates over some of the side-stories, complexities and further likely descendants. Christina took her tapestries (inherited from her great uncle, Erik XIV, who died in 1577) to Rome when she abdicated in 1654, and after her death they were acquired by Don Livio Odescalchi, who made the inventory (a copy of which I consulted in the Hertziana Library in Rome). The inventory of Alexander Farnese: Bertini, ‘La Collection Farnèse’, 134–35. For those who would like to track down other versions: a similar scene (with borders and caption removed and misidentified as a biblical story) was sold at Christie’s New York, 11 January 1994, lot 216); another is noted in Barbier de Montault, ‘Inventaire’, a list of tapestries in Rome (without further specification of place) compiled in the late nineteenth century, pp. 261–62—but this example (which has not come to light) has a shorter caption: ‘Aurum putat Caesar’ (Caesar thinks of the gold); see also Raes De Brusselse Julius Caesar wandtapijtreeksen, 86–87.
30 Forti Grazzini, ‘Catalogo’, 124–26; Karafel, ‘Story’, 256–58. The set owned by Margaret of Parma, Alexander’s mother: Bertini, ‘La Collection Farnèse’, 128.
31 Sotheby’s New York, 17 October 2000, lot 117.
32 The tapestry became part of a popular fake news story that it may have been one of Henry VIII’s original set (see, e.g., The Times 26 December 2016); there can be no doubt, partly on the basis of the design of the borders, that it is one of the later weavings.
33 Suetonius, Julius Caesar 81; Plutarch, Julius Caesar 63; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 1, scene 2. The current location of the tapestry with the caption naming Spurinna is unknown; it is illustrated, from a sale catalogue, in Campbell, ‘New Light’, Fig. 18.
34 These technicalities of tapestry production: Campbell, ‘New Light’. The repertoire of documented scenes include: Caesar crossing the Rubicon; Caesar breaking into the treasury; Caesar marching to Brundisium; Caesar on horseback with prisoner; the sacrifice of a bull; Spurinna foretelling the future (but see below, pp. 207–8); the departure of Pompey’s wife at the start of the war (but see below, pp. 209–10); ‘Caesar fighting a giant’ (but see below, p. 208); the battle of Pharsalus; Pompey and his wife on board ship; the assassination of Pompey; the assassination of Caesar.
35 Helen Wyld, who studied, for the National Trust, the seventeenth-century descendants of this series at Powis Castle has come closest to realising that the standard identifications cannot be correct. http://
36 The only other cycle of images based on Lucan—that I know of—is a mid-sixteenth-century series at Chateau Ancy-le-Franc , but it focusses entirely on the battle of Pharsalus itself (Usher, Epic Arts, 60–73). Individual scenes and characters from the Pharsalia, however, especially Erictho (see below, pp. 207–8) feature in other paintings.
37 Waldstein may have half realised this when he described Henry VIII’s set as ‘the story of Julius Caesar and Pompey’ (my italics): Groos (ed.), Diary of Baron Waldstein, 149.
38 One reads, ‘Queritur ex saga quidnam de Caesare fi / ad. Medium marti bella cavere monet’ (It is inquired from the witch what would happen about Caesar. She warns to beware battle in the midst of war’ (?)); the other ‘Julius hic furiam Caesar fugitat furientem / cognoscens subito bestia quod fuerat’ (Julius Caesar here flees the furious fury, realising suddenly what the beast was (?)).
39 The final ‘a’ of the name may be part of the source of the modern confusion: it is often but not always associated with the female gender.
40 Lucan, Pharsalia, 6, 413–830.
41 This design clearly featured in Alexander Farnese’s set of tapestries: the first three words of two of the variant captions—‘Julius hic Caesar gigantem interficit amplum’ (Here Julius Caesar kills a huge giant) are used to identify one of the Farnese pieces (Bertini, ‘La Collection Farnèse’, 135). The title The War in Germany in an inventory of Pope Julius’s set may perhaps refer to this design too.
42 Lucan, Pharsalia 6, 140–262 (quotation, line 148); Suetonius Julius Caesar 68 refers to this, without the distinctive, lurid detail.
43 Lucan, Pharsalia 3, 114–68; 1, 183–227; 8, 536–691.
44 The tapestry with the ‘correct’ caption was sold at auction, Drouot Richelieu, Paris, 18 October 1993; present location unknown (illustrated by Campbell, ‘New Light’, Fig. 9). Campbell is so convinced that this must show Caesar and his wife that he tries to force this caption (‘Castra petit Magnus maerens Cornelia Lesbum …’) into that frame, claiming that both Pompey and Caesar had a wife called Cornelia (though Caesar’s Cornelia was long dead by the time of the civil war), and that both Caesar and Pompey might be called ‘Great’ or ‘Magnus’ (even though it was Pompey’s standard title). The logo ‘SPQR’ is visible on a version at Powis Castle. Wyld’s discussion of this (http://
45 The tapestry is in the collection of Lisbon Cathedral (illustrated by Campbell, ‘New Light’, Fig. 6). The caption on the ‘Spurinna’ scene, referring to the ‘witch’ (n. 38), may also reflect a correct identification of the scene as Erictho.
46 Medieval interpretations: Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 152–202; Menegaldo, ‘César’ (making it clear that ‘the medieval reading’ was not simply favourable to Caesar). Renaissance and later political interpretations: Hardie, ‘Lucan in the English Renaissance’; Paleit, War, Liberty, and Caesar.
47 Campbell, Henry VIII, 278–80.
48 Van der Straet’s career: Baroni and Sellink (eds), Stradanus. The Latin of the verses is little better than that under Sadeler’s Caesars (on Augustus: ‘cum … teque audes conferre Deo, te Livia sortis / dicitur humanae misto admonuisse veneno’).
49 This Banquet: Suetonius, Augustus 70. The poisoned figs: Dio, Roman History 54, 30. Domitian’s games with flies: Suetonius, Domitian 3. There are enough striking similarities between some of these scenes in the prints and those on the Aldobrandini Tazze to suggest that they may have been one source for the designer of the latter (Siemon, ‘Renaissance Intellectual Culture’, 70–74). If so, it shows how almost identical visual elements can be used to construct an image with an entirely different ideological spin.
50 These imperial series: Jaffé, ‘Rubens’s Roman Emperors’; Jonckheere, Portraits, 84–115.
51 McGrath, ‘Not Even a Fly’; Jonckheere, Portraits, 125–27. A close second in irreverence is Parmigianino’s drawing of Nero (as the god Apollo, from a Roman coin), with a vast penis (Ekserdjian, Parmigianino, 20).
52 Suetonius, Vespasian 4; Domitian 3.
53 This orthodox hierarchy of genres was first established in the later seventeenth century by the art theorist André Felibien. The idea of exemplum virtutis in this context, and the complicated and contested history of ‘history painting’: Green and Seddon (eds), History Painting Reassessed; Bann, ‘Questions of Genre’ (and below, n. 73).
54 Thackeray, Paris Sketch Book, 56–84 (‘On the French School of Painting’).
55 The full title is Siècle d’Auguste: Naissance de N.-S. Jésus-Christ (The age of Augustus: birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ). The painting in the context of other works by Gérôme: House, ‘History without Values’; Gérôme 70–73 (discussing a smaller preliminary painting now in the Getty Museum). The qualms: Gautier, Beaux-arts, 217–29. There was a long artistic and literary history to making a link between the age of Augustus and the birth of Jesus. But part of Gérôme’s inspiration for the theme came from the more recent work of the seventeenth-century theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet: Miller, ‘Gérôme’, 109–11; Gérôme, 70, 72.
56 The story and reception of these paintings: Seznec, ‘Diderot’ and Rickert, Herrscherbild, 129–32. Diderot’s comments: Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, 239 (‘Cela, un empereur!’) and 265. A fourth painting, of the emperor Titus, was commissioned but never produced.
57 The painting is still much discussed, if not admired: Weir, Decadence, 35–37 (a useful introduction); Fried, ‘Thomas Couture’; Boime, Thomas Couture, 131–88 (a full account of the painting’s history). The comparison with a sermon and school recommendation: Ruckstull, ‘Great Ethical Work of Art’, 534, 535.
58 A hint sometimes denied by reading this figure (whose ‘true’ or intended identity is, as usual, unknown) simply as the disapproving figure of the Republican ‘Brutus’; as, for example, in Le Constitutionnel 23 March 1847, 1.
59 There is still debate about Couture’s own political views and the precise contemporary message of the painting. Compare, for example, Boime, Thomas Couture, 183–87 and Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 112–23. The impact spread outside France (see The Daily News 6 April 1847, 3: ‘a powerful protest against the material tendencies of the day’).
60 Les Guêpes 22 (March 1847), 22–23; Mainardi, Art and Politics, 80 notes Louis Napoleon’s attack on the painting in 1855 for representing the French people as ‘Romans of the Decadence’.
61 The poem, by George Olivier: Journal des Artistes, 1847, 201 (‘Gloire au seul Vitellius César’).
62 Appropriately enough, at the Salon, which was held at the Louvre, the Romans of the Decadence hung temporarily in the place of another painting by Veronese, the Wedding Feast at Cana (Gautier, Salon, 9); links with Veronese were drawn in his salon review by Thoré, Salons, 415, by Le Constitutionnel, 23 March 1847, 1, by L’Artiste, Nov./Dec. 1846–Jan./Feb. 1847, 240 (‘nous avons enfin notre Paul Véronèse’), and others.
63 Pougetoux, Georges Rouget, 27–28, 123 (in the wider context of the artist’s work); Rome, Romains, 38–39. His Vitellius was also satirised in Les Guêpes 22 (March 1847), 26 (turning the emperor into a jolly cartoon character).
64 Contemporary comments: ‘S . . ’, Iconoclaste, 6–7 (‘Trois têtes, et c’est fait’); Jean-Pierre Thénot in Écho de la littérature et des beaux-arts 1848, 130.
65 Brief introductions to the prize: Boime, ‘Prix de Rome’ and Grunchec, Grand Prix de Rome, 23–28. A fuller account: Grunchec, Grand Prix de Peinture, 55–121.
66 Grunchec, Grand Prix de Peinture, 254–56 provides documentation of the year’s competition and illustrations of the submissions.
67 Delécluze wrote in the Journal des débats 23 September 1847, 3. Other critics’ dissections: Journal des Artistes 1847, 105–7; Le Constitutionnel 29 September 1847, 3 (Théophile Thoré).
68 The ‘unsuccessful’ subjects were a biblical story and an incident from the life of the Greek playwright Sophocles (Grunchec, Grand Prix de Peinture, 255).
69 Bonnet et al, Devenir peintre, 90.
70 Çakmak, ‘Salon of 1859’ (focussing also on a lost painting by Gérôme dominated by the shrouded body of the dead Dictator); Lübbren, ‘Crime, Time’; Gérôme, 122–25. The stage sets: Ripley, Julius Caesar, 123–25, 185.
71 Rome, Romains, 74–75; Jean-Paul Laurens, 78–79 (in the context of the painter’s wider career). Different versions of the ancient rumours: Tacitus, Annals 6, 50; Suetonius, Caligula 12.
72 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 19, 162–66; Suetonius, Claudius 10; Dio, Roman History 60, 1.
73 Good introductions to his career: Prettejohn et al. (eds), Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema; Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Fry’s fulminations: The Nation 18 January 1913, 666–67 (reprinted in Reed (ed.), Roger Fry Reader, 147–49). Some of the complexities of Alma-Tadema’s place in the history of ‘history painting’: Prettejohn, ‘Recreating Rome’.
74 In contrast to Fry’s judgement, one of the themes of Zimmern, Alma Tadema is the difficulty of some of his painting.
75 This and the other versions: Prettejohn et al. (eds), Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 27, 29, 164–66; Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 37, 61–63. ‘Chronicle’ in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 1906 compares the character of the Praetorian Guard in each of the three paintings. An even more chilling version of the scene is Jean-Paul Raphaël Sinibaldi’s Claudius Named Emperor, discussed in Rome, Romains, 76–77.
76 For example, Ruskin, ‘Notes’ (calling the painter a ‘modern Republican’, while deploring the triviality of the subject matter).
77 Postnikova, ‘Historismus’; Marcos, ‘Vom Monster’, 366.
78 Suetonius, Nero 47–50.
79 Pliny, Natural History 34, 84 (my thanks to Federica Rossi for reminding me of this).
80 Mamontova, ‘Vasily Sergeevich Smirnov’, 245.
1 Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 34 (though the painting has not been prominent in studies of Alma-Tadema).
2 Tacitus, Annals 2, 53–83; Suetonius, Caligula 1–7. Agrippina’s career: Shotter, ‘Agrippina the Elder’.
3 Griffin and Griffin, ‘Show us you care’.
4 The events leading up to the death of Agrippina: Tacitus Annals 4, 52–54; 6, 25–26; Suetonius, Tiberius 53. The recovery of the ashes by Caligula: Suetonius, Caligula 15; CIL 6, 886 (the tombstone). The conversion to corn measure: Esch, ‘On the Reuse’, 22–24.
5 Different views on the identification: Lyttleton in Chambers and Martineau (eds), Splendours, 170; Brown in Giulio Romano, 314. The tug of love: Christiansen, Genius of Andrea Mantegna, 6.
6 ‘Romana princeps’ (the female equivalent of ‘princeps’): Consolatio ad Liviam 356; discussed by Purcell, ‘Livia’ (‘absurd hyperbole’, p. 78). Livia’s career, Barrett, Livia (pp. 307–8 for her name).
7 This point is made by Dio, Roman History 53, 19.
8 A wider discussion of these issues: Duindam, Dynasties, 87–155.
9 Plutarch, Julius Caesar 10.
10 Tatum, Patrician Tribune, 62–86.
11 The poisoned figs: Fig. 6.14a (the line about the figs in I, Claudius was the invention of the scriptwriter, and had nothing to do with the original by Robert Graves). The loving deathbed scene: Suetonius, Augustus 99.
12 The beginning of this tradition (and its sparse Republican precedents, notably the famous statue Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi): Flory, ‘Livia’. Useful reviews of (imperial and elite) female portraits: Wood, Imperial Women; Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 331–69; Hekster, Emperors and Ancestors, 111–59. Female portraiture in the Greek East: Dillon, Female Portrait Statue.
13 Coin images of Livia: Harvey, Julia Augusta, with some wider discussion of women on imperial coinage.
14 Bartman, Portraits of Livia, 88–90 (a book which reviews all known or presumed portraits of her). Even on such a well-contextualised monument as the Altar of Peace, there remain uncertainties on the identification of several female characters of the imperial family: Rose, Dynastic Commemoration, 103–4.
15 The whole group of seventeen imperial statues of different phases: Rose, Dynastic Commemoration, 121–26.
16 A systematic attempt at such minute analysis: Winkes, Livia, Octavia, Iulia.
17 Fejfer, Roman Portraits, 339–40; 351–57.
18 Wood, ‘Subject and Artist’; Smith, ‘Roman Portraits’, 214–15.
19 The cameo and the different identifications: Wood, ‘Messalina’, 230–31; Ginsburg, Representing Agrippina, 136–38, both following studies that see the central figure as Agrippina and the ‘child’ to the left (who may or may not originally have also been in a cornucopia) as the Goddess ‘Roma’; Boschung ‘Bildnistypen’, 72. The Rubens connection: Meulen, Rubens Copies, 139, 191, 197 and 199; McGrath, ‘Rubens’s Infant-Cornucopia’, 317.
20 Tacitus, Annals 13, 16–17.
21 Beard, North and Price, Religions of Rome 206–10; and 348–63; above, pp. 175–76.
22 Wood, ‘Messalina’, esp. 219–30 (also reviewing alternative identifications); Smith, Polis and Personification, 110–12 (for the Greek model).
23 Smith, ‘Imperial Reliefs’, 127–32, for this panel; Marble Reliefs, 74–78, for this panel—where he identifies the divine figure as the goddess ‘Good Fortune’, but with the same general implications. Ceres: Ginsburg, Representing Agrippina, 131–32.
24 Despite important work on the gendered ideology of these statues and their divine attributes (for example, Davies, ‘Portrait Statues’), the problems of the equivalence of empress and divinity are often obscured by a focus on typology (in the case of both imperial and non-imperial women): ‘Ceres-type’, ‘Pudicitia-type’, and so on. This typology in action: Davies, ‘Honorific vs Funerary’; Fejfer, ‘Statues of Roman Women’.
25 The title of this section is borrowed and adapted from Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York, 1975).
26 Zimmer, ‘Aus den Sammlungen’, esp. 8–10 and 19 (on the Mantuan originals, suggesting that, in the absence of any later evidence, they were probably destroyed in the Sack of Mantua in 1630 or had been sent away earlier), 21–22 (on whether Sadeler’s prints were made from the originals which perhaps ended up in Prague, or on copies commissioned by Rudolf II), 29–30 (on the sources and influence of the empresses). There can be no doubt that the old orthodoxy (Wethey, Paintings of Titian, 236–37), that they were an invention of Sadeler, is incorrect. Some of the key archival documents on the ‘empresses’: Venturini. Le collezioni Gonzaga, 46–50 (with documents 303, 306, 307, 310, 314).
27 Full text in Appendix.
28 There may be even more layers of confusion here. When the verse starts (in the words of Pompeia), ‘I am the one born to be the pledge of the love of my father and my husband’, it looks as if the writer has in mind the figure of Caesar’s daughter Julia, who was married to Pompey, and seems to have been an important factor—until her death—in keeping the peace between the two men.
29 The role of the gaps in Fulvio: Kellen, ‘Exemplary Metals’, 285–87; Orgel, Spectacular Performances, 173–79 (illustrating the role of an image of Claudius as a ‘place-filler’ for Cossutia in the 1524 Lyons edition of the book).
30 Juvenal, Satires 6, 122–23 (‘papillis … auratis’).
31 Warren, Art Nouveau, 133 (though imagining Messalina is the sole target of the ‘sexual wit’). As well as Messalina and Her Companion, the title is also recorded as Messalina Returning Home, but it is not clear what Beardsley intended.
32 The print is entitled ‘The Injured Count … S’ (c. 1786); Clark, Scandal, 68–69.
33 Redford, Dilettanti, 135–36.
34 The phrase ‘garden rubbish’ is adapted from Tacitus Annals 11, 32 (‘purgamenta hortorum’). The artist and ‘historico-sadist’, Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse (1859–1938) also painted more or less gruesome scenes of the deaths of the emperor Vitellius, Julius Caesar, the mythical Andromache, the Syrian king Sardanapalus and others (recently discussed by Sérié, ‘Theatricality’, 167–72).
35 Aelius Donatus, Life of Virgil 32, which may be based on Suetonius’s lost Life of the poet.
36 Roworth, ‘Angelica Kauffman’s Place’; Horejsi, Novel Cleopatras, 154–55 (in the context of fictional representations of Octavia). Kauffman’s husband, Antonio Zucchi, also painted a version of the scene, now in Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, UK.
37 Condon et al. (eds), Ingres, 52–59, 160–66; Siegfried, Ingres 56–64 (in part reworking her ‘Ingres’ Reading’, 666–72). The latest, 1864, version: Cohn, ‘Introduction’, 28–30; https://
38 The career of the Elder: above, n. 2. The Younger: Barrett, Agrippina (a ‘straight’ biography); Ginsburg, Representing Agrippina (focussing on the loaded, ideological representations of her).
39 ‘It is a very convenient custom, to give the name of Agrippina to every statue of a Roman female whose character or title cannot be ascertained.’: Critical Review 27 (1799), 558.
40 Prown, ‘Benjamin West’, 38–41; Smith, Nation Made Real, 143–45. From a different critical perspective: Nemerov, ‘Ashes of Germanicus’. It is the subject of an excellent online lecture by John Walsh for Yale University Art Gallery, https://
41 Liversidge, ‘Representing Rome’, 83–86; https://
42 Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art, 274–75; Pierre Rosenberg in Nicolas Poussin, 156–59; Dempsey, ‘Nicolas Poussin’.
43 The winner was Louis-Simon Boizot: Rosenblum, Transformations, 31–32 (reflecting on the influence of Poussin’s version).
44 Hicks, ‘Roman Matron’, 45–47.
45 Tacitus, Annals 14, 1–12 (with the instructions to strike her womb); Suetonius, Nero 34; Dio, Roman History 61, 11–14.
46 Prettejohn, ‘Recreating Rome’, 60–61.
47 Roman de la Rose, 6164–76, discussed in detail by Raimondi, ‘Lectio Boethiana’, 71–77; ‘Monks Tale’, 3669–84. The complex tradition, and many different written and visual forms, of the Revenge: Weigert, French Visual Culture, 161–88 (citing the stage directions, p. 251 n. 30). Nero’s role in the French Middle Ages more generally: Cropp, ‘Nero, Emperor and Tyrant’.
48 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 347–48
49 Nero’s performance as Canace: Suetonius, Nero 21. His reincarnation, Plutarch, On God’s Slowness to Punish 567 E–F. Discussion: Frazer, ‘Nero’; Champlin, Nero, 25–26, 277.
50 The technical details of the Washington panel (including arguments for the later inclusion of Germanicus): Wheelock, Flemish Paintings, 160. Some of the arguments about quality: Wagenberg- Ter Hoeven, ‘Matter of Mistaken Identity’, 116.
51 Just to add to the complexity, doubts have been raised as to whether what is now called the Gonzaga Cameo is really the one owned by the Gonzaga and admired by Rubens: de Grummond, ‘Real Gonzaga Cameo’. The different identifications proposed: Zwierlein-Diehl, Antike Gemmen, 62–65.
52 In the ‘compare and contrast’ tradition, de Grummond’s thesis (Rubens and Antique Coins, 205–26) tries to link other cameos and gems identified as ‘Germanicus’ to this image—with all the usual dangers.
53 The catalogue of the sale of the Lebrun Collection in 1791: de Grummond, Rubens and Antique Coins, 206.
54 Wheelock, Flemish Paintings, 160 and 165 n. 3.
55 Wheelock, Flemish Paintings, 162 is a good example of the squirming: Rubens, he argues, would not have given Tiberius such an idealising look, and it was ‘improbable’ that he would have paired Tiberius with his first wife. Similarly: Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven, ‘Matter of Mistaken Identity’.
56 Suetonius, Tiberius 7.
1 Pasquinelli, La galleria.
2 Sadleir (ed.), Irish Peer, 126–27, an account based entirely on Wilmot’s letters home. On the empresses, she continues that their relation to the emperors is ‘like tête à têtes in a magazine’, referring to a gossipy (or scurrilous) column in Town and Country Magazine in the late eighteenth century, featuring an imaginary dialogue between a man and a woman (Mitchell, ‘The Tête-à-Têtes’).
3 Lewis’s career: Bearden and Henderson, African-American Artists, 54–77; Buick, Child of the Fire (pp 186–207 on this and other Cleopatras). ‘The Death of Cleopatra’: Woods, ‘An African Queen’; Nelson, Color of Stone, 159–78; Gold, ‘The Death of Cleopatra’. The Young Octavian has attracted little comment; but see https://
4 Reviews of the disputed identifications and date: Pollini, Portraiture, 45–53, 96; Lorenz, ‘Die römische Porträtforschung’. The attribution to Canova: Mingazzini, ‘Datazione del ritratto’. The Ostian provenance: Bignamini, ‘I marmi Fagan’, 369–70.
5 One example is the 1994 statue by Khalil Bendib of the assassinated Palestinian-American Alex Odeh, at Santa Ana, California. It is not immediately clear whether Odeh is wearing an Arab robe or Roman toga, but in my own correspondence with Bendib he wrote of it as a toga.
6 Dalí’s fascination with Trajan: King, ‘Ten Recipes’; https://
7 https://
8 Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, 60 (quotation, p. 17, from an interview, June 1980, in Art: Das Kunstmagazin); Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 63–64.
9 Wyke, Projecting the Past (still the classic study); Joshel et al. (eds), Imperial Projections.
10 Landau (ed.), Gladiator (on Gérôme, pp. 22–26, 49); Winkler (ed.), Gladiator.
11 Elliott, Address, Appendix 59.