Twelve Caesars

by Mary Beard

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 384
Rating:

Synopsis:

What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars,” from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns.

Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority.

From Beard’s reconstruction of Titian’s extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII’s famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created.

Mary Beard’s Twelve Caesars is not really about the Caesars per se, neither Suetonius’ canonical Twelve or the wider run of Roman emperors. Instead, it’s about images of the Caesars: the ways we’ve interpreted and reinterpreted ancient and apparently ancient sculptures and images, even the heads on coins, trying to figure out which (if any) give us a real idea of what the Caesars looked like, and the replications we’ve made of those images and what they say.

It’s fascinating to realise how contested some of even the most famous images are, and the mix-ups that has led to even with non-ancient art. It’d be massive egg-on-the-face for a lot of museums, scholars and collectors… if it was more widely known and if even experts don’t make the same errors.

My copy has in-line illustrations in colour, which is a trend in the last few years of non-fiction which I heartily approve of. It means Beard can refer to all kinds of artwork and readers can actually look at them and follow the argument better, though some of the images are quite small and it’s still easier to look them up in a version you can zoom in on.

Beard’s a good writer, clear and compelling, and I really enjoyed this one all round.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)