Princeton (2021) h/b 392pp £30 (9780691222363)
Dame Mary Beard’s fame and popularity have earned her a reward that other classical scholars can only envy: a book brought out with more than 240 illustrations in full colour, in a volume handsomely produced by Princeton University Press. Her subject is the visual reception of Roman emperors. The principal focus is on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but she ranges widely, from Nero (elegantly crowned and bearded) in medieval stained glass, to nineteenth-century salon paintings and forays into modern popular culture: emperors on beermats, matchboxes and chocolate coins, in Astérix, and even Kenneth Williams, famously infamous in Carry On Cleo—a feast of images, a treasure house and a curiosity shop. The greater part of the book was matter new to me, as I suspect it will be to most readers, and it offers the pleasure of being guided on to new ground.
After an introductory chapter, B. looks first at the ancient images of emperors, describing how hard it was for any ruler to impose an idea of his individual appearance on his subjects and on posterity (Julius Caesar and Augustus were exceptions, as Alexander the Great had been earlier), how interchangeable these imperial images were likely to be, and how difficult it can be for modern scholars to judge which emperor a sculpture represents, or indeed to determine whether it represents an emperor at all. She points out that the ‘twelve emperors’ are a mirage. Suetonius wrote about Julius Caesar, the Julio-Claudians, the In-betweeners and the Flavians, and they happen to come to twelve. In the renaissance and after, a set of twelve commonly suited the purposes of decorative art; the most famous emperors always appeared in these, but artists or their patrons were often pretty insouciant about whom to pick to make up the round dozen.
B. uses one chapter to argue that coins were more important in the renaissance reception of antiquity, and in particular of the emperors, than most people realise; this seems convincing. She gives a whole chapter to a set of emperors painted by Titian for a chamber in the palace of Federico Gonzaga Duke of Mantua (later moved to Spain and destroyed by fire), and she traces the multifarious way in which these pictures were imitated and adapted. Much of another chapter is devoted to a set of tapestries depicting Julius Caesar’s career, acquired by Henry VIII (also lost), and here she brings off a coup. She has recognised that the source for the scenes chosen is Lucan’s poem Pharsalia, and she describes in detail how she came to make her discovery.
B. seems to be in two minds about how to treat her material. On the one hand, she brings out its diversity and lack of pattern—the freedom and variety with which this visual repertory was borrowed and adapted, the frequent carelessness, muddle or simple indifference to history or origins. But she also wants to speculate about meanings. The agnostic B. is more persuasive than the speculator. Some of her proposals command ready dissent. In Thomas Couture’s painting The Romans of the Decadence one minor figure is based on a Roman head once wrongly believed to represent Vitellius. Does this mean, B. asks, that Vitellius is to be understood as the host and the moral to be that Roman decadence had begun by AD 69? Of course not: the use of ‘Vitellius’ shows, on the contrary, that this image could be freely exploited in any Roman scene.
In Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi, originally meant as a Last Supper, but altered because the treatment was thought to be too worldly, one of the attendants has a face based, B. says, on the Vitellius. Perhaps—though it looks to me more like a portrait taken from the life. She proposes that this figure alludes to the fact that Vitellius’ father dismissed Pontius Pilate, and this in turn signifies something or other. This is far-fetched indeed, but B. presents it as fact: ‘It is a pity’, she says, to miss it.
B. wonders why Titian painted only eleven emperors: ‘It is hard,’ she writes, ‘to believe the regular modern explanation, that the room … was just too small to fit twelve Caesars comfortably.’ Not only is it not hard, it is almost certainly right. B. tries some other explanations, allows that they do not work, and finally decides that the odd number somehow validates the Gonzaga dynasty by putting them in the line of the Roman emperors. But this is a solution in search of a problem.
She recognises that Lucan as a source for Henry’s tapestries presents a difficulty if they are to carry an ideological message, as the poem is so hostile to Julius Caesar. ‘It would be simplistic,’ she says, ‘to imagine that the scenes on Henry’s tapestries were taken to be a straightforward attack on monarchical rule.’ Not simplistic, simply wrong. She tries, somewhat half heartedly, to imply some darker or subversive import, but of course this will not work. A courtier who valued his head would have been rash to suggest as much to the king. Later she shows several melodramatic salon paintings depicting the murder of emperors, commenting that they show ‘the capacity of nineteenth-century painters to probe critically the nature and foundations of the imperial system’. That is like saying that From Russia with Love is a penetrating enquiry into Soviet geopolitics.
The reality is surely one that elsewhere B. seems to acknowledge: that the emperors were essentially part of a storehouse of imagery, freely available to import dignity, style or grandeur. Twice she refers to ‘fun’: artists ‘having fun with the category’, ‘the dynamic fun of the images of the Caesars’. That seems to be about the size of it. She draws attention herself to the herms outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, long known as the emperors, although they were certainly never meant to be anything of the sort. But it doesn’t matter whether they are emperors or not: they do their work of decoration regardless.
A few yards away in All Souls College stands the statue of Christopher Codrington in the guise of a Roman commander. B. does not mention this, but she does illustrate George I and George II in Cambridge in the same dress. The reasons for this are conventional and aesthetic: there was a deep belief that breeches were incompatible with bronze or marble. That conviction was long lasting: it is why Samuel Johnson in St Paul’s Cathedral and Robert Peel in Westminster Abbey are clad in togas (later in the nineteenth century knightly or academic robes were used to mitigate the embarrassment of trousers).
There are some hints that B. does not take all her suggestions too seriously. In one place ‘certainly’ in the main text becomes ‘my own sense’ in the notes. In another she talks of the subversive meanings that she is ‘tempted’ to find. Some of her ideas have the feel of ballons d’essai, the sort of thoughts that one might throw out in a lecture or class to see if they will fly. The book does indeed originate in lectures given at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and much of the text preserves the lecture character, leisurely, digressive, colloquial, anecdotal, jokey (‘think Ivanka Trump, Cherie Blair or Meghan Markle’), but there is also plenty of clear expository prose. The identification of Lucan as the source for the scenes on Henry VIII’s tapestries is an addition to knowledge, and the material is rich.
Richard Jenkyns