![]() ![]() It is a glorious series of images, recreating the lavish Roman processions held to celebrate Julius Caesar’s military victories. And significantly it is a mismatch found elsewhere at Hampton Court.Ī much more admired set of paintings in the palace are Andrea Mantegna’s The Triumphs of Caesar, painted in the 15th century and brought to England in Charles I’s great haul of artworks from Mantua, Italy, in the early 17th century. None of these ideas quite get around the problem of the glaring mismatch between the ancient figures on such prominent display and the public relations of the 18th-century monarch. ![]() Was there a coded religious message here, in the conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants? Or were most people in the 18th century as uncertain about the story behind the painting as we are? (Julian’s skit was a bit better known then but, honestly, not much.) What on earth is this scene doing on the main staircase up to the king’s apartments? What was the king – or his visitors, or his servants – to make of this parade of classical rulers, almost all of whom fell somewhere on the spectrum between villain and idiot? There have been many modern attempts to explain it. They have not yet been told that they will not be dining with the gods at the empty table that is balanced in the clouds above their heads. What we see in the painting is a colourful lineup of emperors, including a rather haughty Julius Caesar and a dissolute Nero. In this squib Julian imagines that a group of those earlier rulers, now long dead, were keen to have dinner with the Roman gods, but that the gods were not so sure – and after much to-ing and fro-ing, and a good bit of character assassination, withdrew the invitation. It is a clever illustration of a niche satirical skit written by the emperor Julian in the fourth century AD about his predecessors. But it is, in fact, far from “senseless”. An exercise in “extreme baroque”, it is now usually ignored by visitors, if not deplored: “gaudy colour, bad drawing and senseless composition” as one unimpressed 19th-century critic dubbed it. ![]() My favourite example is the decoration of the so-called King’s Staircase at Hampton Court Palace – painted in the early 18th century, decades after the palace’s Tudor heyday, by Antonio Verrio. So what were they doing centuries later plastered over the palaces of dynasts? And does this have anything to teach us in our own “culture wars”? Does it help us think a bit harder about what images of power, and the powerful, are for? They have gone down in history as an unsavoury bunch, almost universally derided, and of the famous first 12, Julius Caesar to Domitian, there was only one (the down-to-earth Vespasian who came to the throne in AD69) for whom there was no suggestion that he had been murdered or forced to take his own life. But it doesn’t take much thought to see the problem here: they are hardly figures to be admired. ![]() In fact, some of the earliest European wallpaper to survive features the heads of Roman emperors. They are not much more than pricey wallpaper. Most of us, me included, walk straight past them, as if they were merely the predictable backdrop to the power politics of the past, designed to give a hint of the allure of “the Caesars” to each new man on the make. These are sometimes authentic ancient portraits, but more often they are slightly over-the-top replicas created in the 17th or 18th centuries. There is hardly a stately home or a modern museum in the west that does not have its line-up of busts of the first “12 Caesars”, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44BC) to Domitian (assassinated AD96). Centuries later, images of Roman emperors are still part of the backdrop of power. ![]()
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