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3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
I always like her books, they are nicely written and feel like a white noise machine. This one was well integrated with the pictures of the art and with the explanations.
It was wild what people put the faces of the emperors on.
It was wild what people put the faces of the emperors on.
informative
Mary Beard is a brilliant historian. Looking forward to reading her books on the Roman Empire.
informative
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Fascinating tour of art history using the images of the Caesars to show how these icons of power have been used through the ages. Interesting to learn more about the history of imperial Rome, Suetonius’ history of the twelve Caesars, how the Caesars promoted their image-making through coins and sculpture, and then how those images in turn were used by subsequent rulers, artists, and critics throughout history as a reference for power, the dangers and excesses of it, and the reminder that all empires fade. My second Mary Beard after “Women in Power”. Looking forward to reading more of her work, especially “SPQR”.
This book was illustrated beautifully throughout with hundreds of works - some of my favorites included Johann Heinrich Fuseli’s “small chalk drawing (less than half a metre tall), The Artist’s Despair before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins”; Marcantonio Raimondi’s “series of prints of emperors completed by two almost absurdly chubby putti clutching skulls underneath the slogan ‘Memento mori, dico’ (Remember you must die)“; Horatio Greenough’s “colossal portrait of George Washington evok[ing] the Republican Cincinnatus in the act of returning his sword of office and so returning power to the people [which] disastrously overplayed its hand in modelling the American republican hero on a classical Greek god”; a medieval tapestry of Caesar crossing the Rubicon; Antonio Verrio's early eighteenth-century baroque spectacle on the 'King's Staircase' at Hampton Court Palace; Jean-Léon Gérôme's The Age of Augustus, The Birth of Christ; and the Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), in which “Lawrence Alma-Tadema captures the paradoxes of imperial power, which “focuses on the 'generosity' of Elagabalus in showering his quests with rose petals; but, according to the story, the petals smother and kill them.”
Some highlights of the book:
“My guess is that, before ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’, there were more images in Western art of Roman emperors than of any other human figures, with the exception of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and a small handful of saints.”
“They certainly appealed to the taste of the very rich. There was hardly an aristocratic residence in Renaissance Rome without at least one complete set of busts of the Caesars.”
“A question relevant to any set of emperors, whether in paint or paper, marble or wax. Who was looking at them and at whom were they aimed?”
“With Roman rulers everything comes down to the face.”
“[Not] all the Roman rulers following [Julius] Caesar have an equally distinctive ‘look’ in ancient or modern art: far from it. Among Suetonius’s Twelve, Nero—with his characteristic double chin and sometimes the beginnings of a stubbly beard—regularly stands out in line-ups of marble busts almost as clearly as Julius Caesar; likewise, it is not hard to spot the almost impossibly perfect and youthful Augustus or the recognisably middle-aged, down-to-earth Vespasian. But for modern viewers there are some frustrating mismatches between the emperors who are most memorably described in literature—Caligula, for example—and their rather bland representations in marble... [However], carefully constructed similarity (as well as occasional difference) could be the whole point.”
“Whatever the glimpses of individuality we may catch in Claudius’s slightly piggy eyes, Nero’s jowly double chin, or later in Trajan’s neat fringe, or Hadrian’s bushy beard, the emperors’ public portraits were about identity in the political, rather than the personal, sense. They were also about incorporating their subject into the genealogy of power and legitimating his place in the imperial succession… The general principle was that portraits were designed to make the emperor look the part, and for the first imperial dynasty looking the part meant looking like Augustus… [Then], after the fall of Nero and a year of civil war between 68 and 69 CE, the new dynasty of emperors—the ‘Flavians’, after its founder Flavius Vespasianus—was installed, and portraiture changed with the politics. Vespasian, as he is now usually known, adopted a ‘warts and all’ style, in contrast to the idealising perfection of the Julio-Claudian ‘look’. In general, the new emperor emphasised his down-to-earth approach to imperial power, his no-nonsense family background in a decidedly unfashionable part of Italy and his hard experience as a soldier.”
“Julius Caesar has always been more intensely argued over than any other Roman ruler. Writers, activists and citizens have for centuries debated which side they were on: Caesar’s or his assassins’? Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is only one, brilliantly ambivalent, meditation on this question. In the early fourteenth century, Dante imagined the assassins Brutus and Cassius in the very lowest of circle of hell, their feet stuffed into the mouths of Satan himself, only slightly better off than Judas Iscariot who is chewed up head-first.”
“Images of the power of Roman emperors have always gone hand in hand with the portrayal of their personal vices—and with the hint of the systemic corruption of the imperial regime of which those vices were a symbol.”
“In the dialogue between present and past, imperial faces and imperial life-stories were alternately—even simultaneously—paraded as the legitimators of modern dynastic power, questioned as dubious role models or deplored as emblems of corruption. Not unlike the contested images in our modern ‘sculpture wars’, they provided a focus for debates on power and its discontents (and they are a useful reminder that the function of commemorative portraits is not simply celebration).”
— Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts Book 60) by Mary Beard
https://a.co/ctVoGVg
This book was illustrated beautifully throughout with hundreds of works - some of my favorites included Johann Heinrich Fuseli’s “small chalk drawing (less than half a metre tall), The Artist’s Despair before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins”; Marcantonio Raimondi’s “series of prints of emperors completed by two almost absurdly chubby putti clutching skulls underneath the slogan ‘Memento mori, dico’ (Remember you must die)“; Horatio Greenough’s “colossal portrait of George Washington evok[ing] the Republican Cincinnatus in the act of returning his sword of office and so returning power to the people [which] disastrously overplayed its hand in modelling the American republican hero on a classical Greek god”; a medieval tapestry of Caesar crossing the Rubicon; Antonio Verrio's early eighteenth-century baroque spectacle on the 'King's Staircase' at Hampton Court Palace; Jean-Léon Gérôme's The Age of Augustus, The Birth of Christ; and the Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), in which “Lawrence Alma-Tadema captures the paradoxes of imperial power, which “focuses on the 'generosity' of Elagabalus in showering his quests with rose petals; but, according to the story, the petals smother and kill them.”
Some highlights of the book:
“My guess is that, before ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’, there were more images in Western art of Roman emperors than of any other human figures, with the exception of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and a small handful of saints.”
“They certainly appealed to the taste of the very rich. There was hardly an aristocratic residence in Renaissance Rome without at least one complete set of busts of the Caesars.”
“A question relevant to any set of emperors, whether in paint or paper, marble or wax. Who was looking at them and at whom were they aimed?”
“With Roman rulers everything comes down to the face.”
“[Not] all the Roman rulers following [Julius] Caesar have an equally distinctive ‘look’ in ancient or modern art: far from it. Among Suetonius’s Twelve, Nero—with his characteristic double chin and sometimes the beginnings of a stubbly beard—regularly stands out in line-ups of marble busts almost as clearly as Julius Caesar; likewise, it is not hard to spot the almost impossibly perfect and youthful Augustus or the recognisably middle-aged, down-to-earth Vespasian. But for modern viewers there are some frustrating mismatches between the emperors who are most memorably described in literature—Caligula, for example—and their rather bland representations in marble... [However], carefully constructed similarity (as well as occasional difference) could be the whole point.”
“Whatever the glimpses of individuality we may catch in Claudius’s slightly piggy eyes, Nero’s jowly double chin, or later in Trajan’s neat fringe, or Hadrian’s bushy beard, the emperors’ public portraits were about identity in the political, rather than the personal, sense. They were also about incorporating their subject into the genealogy of power and legitimating his place in the imperial succession… The general principle was that portraits were designed to make the emperor look the part, and for the first imperial dynasty looking the part meant looking like Augustus… [Then], after the fall of Nero and a year of civil war between 68 and 69 CE, the new dynasty of emperors—the ‘Flavians’, after its founder Flavius Vespasianus—was installed, and portraiture changed with the politics. Vespasian, as he is now usually known, adopted a ‘warts and all’ style, in contrast to the idealising perfection of the Julio-Claudian ‘look’. In general, the new emperor emphasised his down-to-earth approach to imperial power, his no-nonsense family background in a decidedly unfashionable part of Italy and his hard experience as a soldier.”
“Julius Caesar has always been more intensely argued over than any other Roman ruler. Writers, activists and citizens have for centuries debated which side they were on: Caesar’s or his assassins’? Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is only one, brilliantly ambivalent, meditation on this question. In the early fourteenth century, Dante imagined the assassins Brutus and Cassius in the very lowest of circle of hell, their feet stuffed into the mouths of Satan himself, only slightly better off than Judas Iscariot who is chewed up head-first.”
“Images of the power of Roman emperors have always gone hand in hand with the portrayal of their personal vices—and with the hint of the systemic corruption of the imperial regime of which those vices were a symbol.”
“In the dialogue between present and past, imperial faces and imperial life-stories were alternately—even simultaneously—paraded as the legitimators of modern dynastic power, questioned as dubious role models or deplored as emblems of corruption. Not unlike the contested images in our modern ‘sculpture wars’, they provided a focus for debates on power and its discontents (and they are a useful reminder that the function of commemorative portraits is not simply celebration).”
— Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts Book 60) by Mary Beard
https://a.co/ctVoGVg