One of the collecting areas popular since the Renaissance were portraits of the emperors of ancient Rome. Inspired by Suetonius, who presented the twelve rulers from Caesar to Domitian in a canonical work of biographies, these portraits appeared in series, as long walls had to be filled in representative rooms and many niches had to be equipped. Mary Beard begins her book on the history of the impact of Roman rulers' portraits, which emerged from her AW Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, in antiquity, when depictions of the respective ruling emperor were omnipresent - there were an estimated twenty-five to fifty thousand portraits of Augustus alone, by which came about two hundred upon us.
The main emphasis of Beard's richly illustrated book, however, is on modern artifacts.
Even if the emperors are no longer as present in the visual memory of our time as they were in the past, they have left deep traces in the visual language of portraits in Europe and North America and have long been the medium of choice for reflecting the monarchy and political power .
The emperors not only served nobles and rulers to show wealth and taste, they were also elements of an actual self-formation, as role models as well as frightening examples.
Strange misinterpretations and startling twists and turns
Beard works out how the profile portraits on Roman coins in the Renaissance as "cultural currency" shaped the ideas of the appearance of the emperors more than any other media and they also promoted the idea of the series, far more than the later so important marble heads that often were incorrectly identified and, even in large collections, almost never came together in a complete series - only plaster casts made this possible. With recognizable pleasure and intimate connoisseurship, the world's most prominent and productive living classical scholar tells intricate stories of discoveries, interpretations and misinterpretations, hopes and disappointments, controversies and changes of ownership. Nothing is certain, nothing lasts.The concept of the authentic is in any case difficult to maintain in view of the diverse processes from ancient reworking to modern repairs and additions to re-creation or forgery - which is not the same.
Beard started with an American naval officer who brought a richly decorated marble sarcophagus from what is now Lebanon to the United States.
For certain reasons he took it - certainly wrongly - for the final resting place of the short-term emperor Alexander Severus and offered it to the former president Andrew Jackson for the same purpose.
The latter refused with brusque republican rhetoric, probably precisely because he had occasionally been apostrophized as "Caesar" for his form of authoritarian populism during his politically active time.
Knowledge becomes science
With a love of detective details, the author discusses prominent series, such as the Aldobrandini Tazze from the late sixteenth century, twelve socketed silver bowls with the Suetonian canon in the form of figurines. She and other groups also suggested modifying and modernizing this canon - Beard speaks somewhat fashionably of a "porosity of the category of emperor", one of her favorite words is "fluidity". The changing attributions and assignments also provided every certainty with an uncertain expiry date. The history of Titian's eleven imperial paintings and their twelve completed copies, through which we alone have knowledge of the lost originals, was characterized by numerous strange misinterpretations, astonishing twists and turns, proud owners,tricky intermediaries and dangerous transports.
But the book doesn't just tell an exciting story. Thanks to her intimate knowledge of the sources, Beard can trace the motifs of a series of ten Flemish tapestries, once made for Henry the Eighth, with scenes from the life of Caesar, back to the epic “Pharsalia”, in which the early imperial poet Lucan depicts the struggles for monarchy and war the autocracy marks.
With Beard, it becomes more implicitly clear how a growing need for authenticity and the desire to correctly assign what is obsessed made a lasting contribution to further developing connoisseurship of science. By compiling the antiquities in large thesauri, comparing them and comparing them with the ancient texts, antiquarians achieved great things since the Renaissance. Due to her ironic-critical attitude, the author formulates the continuity rather negatively: Nowadays, art archaeologists have basically no other instruments at their disposal than those ancestors at the time, as they were, for example, in the debates about the identification of what was found in the Rhone years ago and immediately identified as Caesar Head or on the well-known "green Caesar" in Berlin, who is portrayed as a portrait of the dictator,was addressed as a portrait of a partisan or as a modern product. Among the members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, research had at times even cultivated the perverse interest in differentiating heads that were once designed to be indistinguishable, according to one of the quite a few Sottisen about whom this book is worth reading.
Mary Beard: "Twelve Caesars". Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern.
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2021. 392 pp., Ill., Hardcover, 31 euros.