B.'s book, based on a series of A.W. Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered in Washington in 2011, is a welcome contribution to the study of representation of Roman emperors in early modern visual arts. Apart from M. Wyke's landmark Caesar: a Life in Western Culture (2007), which refers to visual depictions of Julius Caesar and evaluates the connotations they entail, recent studies, such as C. Vout's Classical Art: a Life History from Antiquity to the Present (2018), have touched on images of specific emperors only as part of a wider discourse on reception. By choosing Suetonius’ narrative as the starting point providing the chronological and thematic framework, B. offers a unique perspective on the perception of the Twelve Caesars that underscores their importance while steering away from the niche occupied by textual analysis and commentaries. Her complex, lavishly illustrated cross-disciplinary study brings together Classics and art history by masterfully incorporating ancient accounts of the often polarising imperial figures with a discussion of their visual reimagining (and that of some of their female relations) in Western art.
With her hallmark eye-opening attention to detail, familiar from the illuminating Classical Art: from Greece to Rome (co-authored with J. Henderson [2001]), B. engages with a striking array of sculpture, painting and decorative art from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, with occasional references to later and contemporary works carefully selected to complete the picture. She considers various aspects of their creation, raison d’être and reception in order to address the aims of the study, laid out in the preface and best summarised by the question: ‘What do the faces of long-dead autocrats, many more with a reputation for villainy than for heroism, mean to modern audiences?’ (p. x).
The fundamental premise of the book is that the Twelve Emperors embody the idea of creative dialogue between antiquity and modernity: as modern understanding of ancient Rome manifests itself by the desire to replicate and emulate but also to modify and contest the ancient originals, these processes shed light on the changing imperial aesthetic and connotations of authority. A flexible and ‘porous’ (an adjective B. finds appropriate on more than one occasion) entity, the Caesars exist both as a set and as individuals, and ‘it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Western secular portraiture of living subjects was born in dialogue with the style, faces and dress of the rulers of ancient Rome’ (p. 100).
Following an introductory chapter setting the context and scope of the book, in Chapter 2 B. presents the cases of identifications and misidentifications of ancient Roman sculptures of the Caesars and their later replicas. She reflects on the difficulties of accurate dating and verification of the authenticity of Roman marble statues and busts, a process complicated by the nature of the material, as well as the techniques used to restore and maintain it. Chapter 3 focuses on the importance of imperial coins as popular collectibles across Europe, offering the most vivid pictures of the emperors in the period from the mid-fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries and translated into the roundels familiar from facades of buildings and manuscripts. Special attention is paid to the aesthetic paradigm shift that took place during the Renaissance, when the convention to portray Roman rulers in contemporary dress gradually diminished, giving way to the trend to depict modern subjects in ancient Roman guise.
Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to the significance of the rearrangements, replacements and omissions of the set of the Twelve Caesars. The highlights of the subject are the twelve silver-gilt dishes known as the ‘Aldobrandini Tazze’, which, according to B., are the ‘earliest systematic attempt to illustrate Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars to have survived’ (p. 119), and Titian's set of paintings of eleven of the Caesars, hugely popular in its time, but now only known from the engravings of copies of its copies. B. discusses the confusion caused by the incidental misplacement of some of the miniature figures of the emperors screwed on top of each Tazze and draws conclusions about the mutable identities of the Caesars. She considers Titian's works together with their numerous copies and engages with the question why Titian did not paint the portrait of Domitian, putting forward the theory that the Gonzaga family, who commissioned the works, intended to depict their future as an enduring dynasty and chose to omit the emperor with whom the Flavian dynasty ended. B.'s argument is plausible given the aristocratic urge to establish a sense of continuity with the Roman imperial line and outweighs the purely pragmatic consideration of the lack of space in the special room where the paintings hung.
In Chapter 6 Caesar-themed objects at Hampton Court Palace take centre stage in the discussion of the ambiguity intrinsic to the European monarchies’ emulation of imperial Rome. The anxieties triggered by the notorious moral corruption and excess the Caesars often epitomised are seen by B. to find expression in the King's staircase, painted by Antonio Verrio in the early eighteenth century and representing scenes from Julian's satirical work The Caesars, as well as to offer an alternative reading of Andrea Mantegna's paintings Triumphs of Caesar.
Among the book's major contributions to the early modern reception of imperial Roman culture is the discussion of the Hampton Court tapestries, traditionally known as depicting events from the life of Julius Caesar. These works, once the second most precious objects in the household of Henry VIII, disappeared in the nineteenth century. By analysing other Caesar-themed works by the same weaver and found in various collections, B. makes a convincing case that the tapestries in fact depicted scenes from Lucan's Pharsalia. This hypothesis, which, to my knowledge, has not been considered by some of the prominent scholars working on tapestries, including Thomas Campbell and Guy Delmarcel, enriches the understanding of the epic poem's profound importance for the Renaissance discourses of imperial power.
The final chapter is dedicated to the portrayal of notable women in the world of the Twelve Caesars: Agrippina the Elder, her daughter Agrippina the Younger (Nero's mother) and the notorious Messalina. Here the author of the recent feminist manifesto Women & Power (2017) is in full swing: she argues that the uniformity in the depiction of ancient Roman women in sculpture ‘acted as an antidote to the potentially disrupting effects of the demands, desires and disloyalties of the individual women in the political hierarchy’ (pp. 244–5). Critical of the seemingly flattering acceptance of the representation of imperial women as goddesses, B. claims that ‘blending the figures of empress and goddess was both a gesture of honour to the imperial woman concerned, and at the same time a strategy for effacing her individuality and worldly power’ (p. 249). Although ardent, B.'s feminist stance is nevertheless well-measured and offers generous food for thought on the problematic sidelining of the female presence in imperial Rome as well as modernity's (re)creation of female archetypes.
B.'s strategy to structure the argument of the book around the capacity of specific artworks to illustrate bigger aesthetic and ideological currents results in an engaging, well-rounded and comprehensive picture of the subject matter. The study is further enriched by meticulous cross-referencing, which establishes insightful connections. Last but not least, by describing the often curious background stories or fates shrouded in mystery of her case studies, B. offers a glimpse into the fascinating early modern world of the art/artefact collectors and dealers travelling across Europe to procure much-wanted works for their customers.
