Portraitures of Julius Caesar : a monograph

Front matter

PORTRAITURES

JULIUS (LESAR

PORTRAITURES

Contents

CHAPTER VI — Continued

PAGE

Italy, Naples 80

Appendix

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FULL-PAGE PLATES AND INSET-ENGRAVINGS Vignette. Julius Caesar in Youth. An ideal by the author . Frontispiece

PLATE PAGE

I. Colossal Marble Head of Julius Caesar, in the Museum of

Naples 1

II. Coins bearing Julius Caesar's Effigy, in the Museum of Naples 11

III. Coins bearing Julius Caesar's Effigy, in the Cabinet of Coins

and Medallions, Paris 13

Vignette. Ideal Head of Julius Caesar, after Ingres, Paris . 18

IV. Head of Julius Caesar in the Vatican, Rome : Chiaramonti

Gallery, No. 107. Front view 19

V. Head of Marius, the Vatican, Rome 21

VI. Head of Sylla, the Vatican, Rome 23

VII. Bust of Cicero, Capitoline Museum, Rome .... 25 VIII. Head of Ponipey, from the statue in the Spada Palace, Rome. (Reproduced from the engraving in "Julius Caesar," by W. W. Fowler, by permission of Messrs.

Putnams.) 30

IX. Statue of Julius Caesar, of the Court of the Capitoline, Rome.

Side view 54

X. Bust of Julius Caesar as Pontifex Maximus, the Vatican,

Chiaramonti Gallery, Rome 64

XL Colossal Bust of Caesar, Paris Exposition, 1900 ... 68 Vignette. Ideal of Caesar, from a French painting . . 74 XII. Casts from Celebrated Busts seen in Perspective in the

Author's Studio 75

INSET-ENGRAVING

Fig. 1. Profile of the Colossal Head of Julius Caesar, of the

Museum of Naples 80

ix

X

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE INSET-ENGRAVING PAGE

XIII. Head of the Statue of Julius Caesar, in the Court of the

Capitoline, Rome 83

XIV. Capitoline Statue. Front view ...... 84

Fig. 2. Head of Same in Profile 83

Fig. 3. Profile of Caesar Head, in Corridor of Conservatori

Museum, Capitoline, Rome 86

Fig. 4. Caesar Bust, Hall of the Emperors, Conservatori

Museum, Rome 87

XV. Bust of Julius Caesar, Hall of Busts, No. 282, the Vatican,

Rome 88

XVI. Bust of Julius Caesar, Chiaramonti Gallery, No. 107, the

Vatican, Rome. Side view 90

Fig. 6. Bust in Portico of Villa Borghese, Rome ... 94

Fig. 7. Bust in Main Hall, Villa Borghese, Rome . . 95

Fig. 8. Bronze Bust of the Ludivisi Collection, Rome . . 96

XVII. Bust of Julius Caesar in the Corsini Palace, Rome . . . 100

Fig. 9. Antique " Old Roman," Corridor, Corsini Gallery . 101

Fig. 10. Marble Head in Doria Gallery, Rome . . . 102

Fig. 11. Garden Bust, Villa Mattei-Hoffman, Rome . . 103 Fig. 12. Bust of Julius Caesar, Borghese Palace, Hall " Mario

dei Fiore," Rome 104

XVIII. Antique Caesar Bust, National Museum (Baths of Diocletian),

Rome 105

Fig. 15. Profile of the Bronze Head of Julius Caesar, of the

Uffizi Museum, Florence 109

Fig. 16. Profile of the Marble Head of Julius Caesar, Uffizi

Museum, Florence 110

XIX. Marble Head of Julius Caesar in the " Tresoria," Pitti Palace,

Fig. 18. Profile of Bust, of Pallazo Ricardo . . . .113 XX. Head of Julius Caesar, of the Campo Santo, Pisa . . .114

Fig. 19. Same Head, front view 114

Fig. 20. Same Head, in profile 115

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi

PLATE INSET-ENGRAVING PAGE

XXL Bust of Julius Caesar (half-life-size), of the Museum of

Antiquities, Parma 116

Fig. 21. Profile View of the Same 116

Fig. 22. Head of Julius Caesar, in the Antique Museum, Turin 119 Fig. 23. On Left, same as Fig. 22. On Right, same as Plate

XXII 120

XXII. Marble " Mask " of Julius Caesar, Museum of Antiquities,

XXIII. Marble Bust of Julius Caesar, Royal Museum of Berlin . . 123 Fig. 24. Profile of the Same 123

XXIV. Statue of Julius Caesar, Royal Museum of Berlin . . . 124 Fig. 25. Profile of the Same 124

XXV. Basalt Bust, of the Royal Museum of Berlin . . . .126

Fig. 27. Half-life-size Marble Bust of Julius Caesar, Alberti-

num Gallery, Dresden 127

Fig. 28. Life-size Marble Bust, same Gallery. Front view . 128

XXVI. Bust of Julius Caesar, Walraff Museum, Cologne . . . 130

XXVII. Basalt Bust of Julius Caesar, St. Cloud, France . . . 133

Fig. 32. Toga Statue of Julius Caesar, Louvre, Paris . . 136

Fig. 33. Head of the Statue, " Mars," Louvre, Paris . . 137

Fig. 34. Head labelled "Jules Cesar," Louvre, Paris . . 139

Fig. 35. Head in Gallerie Mollien, Louvre, Paris . . . 140

XXVIII. Statue of " Hermes " or Julius Caesar, Louvre, Paris . . 141

Fig. 36. Head only of Same 142

XXIX. Bronze Head of Julius Caesar, in the Cabinet des Medailles,

Fig. 37. Profile Sketch of Same 144

XXX. Profile from Cast of Same 146

Fig. 38. Profile Sketch of Antique Bronze, Museum of Douai 147

Fig. 39. Photograph of Same 148

Fig. 40. Bronze Statuette of Julius Caesar, Besancon . .152

XXXI. Porphyry Bust from Herculaneum, Royal Palace, Madrid . 153

Fig. 41. Marble Bust of Julius Caesar, Prado Museum, Madrid 155 xii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE INSET-ENGRAVING PAGE

Fig. 42. Marble Bust of Julius Caesar, Prado Museum, Madrid 156 Fig. 43. Small Bronze Bust, in a Cabinet of the Bibliotheca

Nacionale, Madrid 157

Fig. 44. Small Bronze Bust, Julius Caesar, same Cabinet . 158

XXXII. Columns of the Alemada de Hercules, Sevilla, Spain . . 159

Fig. 45. Marble Bust, Casa de Pdatos, Sevilla, Spain . . 161

XXXIII. Head of Julius Caesar, Roman Gallery, British Museum . 164 Fig. 46. Profile of the Same 164

XXXIV. Gems from the British Museum, enlarged .... 170

Fig. 47. Caesar Coins, from the Same 170

Fig. 48. Head of Caesar, South Kensington Museum . . 171

XXXV. Statue of a Roman in the Act of Sacrificing. A cast from

the Vatican, Sydenham, Gallery of Casts . . . .173

XXXVI. Head of Julius Caesar, Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh . 175

Fig. 49. Bust owned by General Abbott, Cambridge, Mass. . 179 XXXVII. Vignette. An Ideal of Caesar. " Xearing the End," by the

author 183

ERRATA

Page 85, fourth line from bottom. The plates (PI. IX and PL XIV) facing pages 19 and 83 should read facing pages 54 and 84.

Page 89, second line of uNo. 6." Plate XVI opposite should read facing page 90.

Page 107, fourth line from bottom. Plate XIX should read Plate XVIII.

Page 108, last line of first paragraph, (our No. 63) should read (our No. 65).

Page 112, fifth line from bottom, page plate opposite should read page plate XIX.

Page 121, line 2, for Plate No. XXI read Plate No. XXII.

PLATE I

Colossal Bust of Julius C-esar, of the Museum of Naples

PORTRAITURES OF JULIUS

CAESAR

CHAPTER I Introductory : Data of Judgment of Portraits

One needs make no apology for admiration of great men, whether they lived thousands of years ago, or now influence the affairs of living nations. A man who made so great a mark upon ages far remote that the recorded facts of his career still reverberate through the halls of knowledge, and take on greater sound and significance the more they are known, is the man we may be very sure is worth studying. Reading the biographies of such men has a perpetual fascination for us, so that neither the narrowness of provincial conceit, nor — what is very like it — of national pride, can smother or much abate our appreciation ; though the great ones be of nations or races quite alien to our own, and thousands of years in their ashes. Confucius, Moses, Rameses, Homer, Gautama, Solon, Plato, Archimedes, Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, Julius Caesar, Christ, Charlemagne, Michael Angelo, Columbus, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Peter the Great, Martin Luther, Newton, Voltaire, Franklin, Washington, Mirabeau, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Thiers, Victor Hugo,

Bismarck, Darwin, Lincoln, and a thousand others perhaps equally illustrious, scattered through all periods of historic time, derive very little additional interest from their nearness to, or remoteness from, our own time. Each has his special halo, and in general it beams with so wide a light that it must be a blinded mind that does not see in each life named something that has influenced the human race on every side with an undying influence. Curiosity prompts every wide-awake mind to know more and more of such men. How they lived, moved, and worked in their own times, what they did, how they did it, how they looked, what people about them said of them, if they were powerful or conspicuous ; or how, if unknown and unappreciated in their lives, their influence became great only as* the intelligence of succeeding ages enabled men to understand them, — all these things make the biographies of great men at once the most fascinating and the most instructive of reading. If the historical biographies concerning the great things they did contain also facts and incidents from which we learn their merely personal and commonplace peculiarities and habits, these give a greatly added zest to our interest. Even their faults and their foibles to some minds furnish the most piquant part of the biography ; since they satisfy the vanity of the humblest reader by leaving in his mind the assurance that every great man was in some way just like himself.

In ancient times sculptures in stone and casts in bronze were the most approved means to preserve the likenesses of men of distinction. Those fine arts only reached great perfection in portraiture in the prosperous era of Greece, though some approximation to good sculptural portraiture is found in previous Assyrian and Egyptian civilization. How early painting may have been used with skill and power to accurately portray distinguished people it is hard to determine, since the lesser durability and resistance of paint on plaster walls, or on wood and canvas, leaves us only guess-work as to what may have been done earlier than that era of the Roman Empire when the paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried ; that is to say, painting as it was practised in the reigns of the first Roman emperors. Those paintings, preserved through eighteen hundred years without blemish, prove that in the delineation of graces of form, and plays of the imagination concerning the gods and goddesses of their mythology, as well as in the technique of painting, the artists of that day had little to learn from later times. But in portraits of their contemporaries, no matter how famous, those painters have left us but the smallest evidences of their skill ; so that we may fairly infer that the art of sculpture which developed so marvellously in Greece many centuries before, and immortalized in stone so many of her citizens whose deeds were also commemorated in her literature, was the only art by which life-like portraits have been preserved.

Long before, in India, Assyria, Persia, and Egypt, it is true that profile portraits were cut with exquisite art in gems, and by the Etruscans before Rome was; but these can rarely be so perfect as portraits of larger size. Yet, in connection with the preserved coins of all ages, they furnish a vast mass of histrionic study in modern museums.

It was perhaps about a thousand years after Christ that out of the barbarism of the feudal ages the nebulae of the fine arts began to glow here and there in the cities of Europe. Religious subjects claimed right of way, but, in a few centuries after, the pencils that were particularly deft in the delineation of holy virgins, saints, and muscular deities, were not less perfect in portraiture ; so that in the fifteenth century the very highest level of perfection was reached in Italy. Whoever had great rank, money, or other cause of celebrity, had no reason to be omitted from such immortality as the painters and sculptors of Italy could make for them. The arts of engraving followed ; then printing. At last, in our own age, the Daguerrian and photographic arts enable all men women and children to be kept in remembrance so long as they are esteemed enough to have their pictures preserved from fire and the waste-basket. Many have an ephemeral life in albums and newspapers ; a smaller number in good magazines ; a still smaller number in books that may be permanent ; and of the latter a selected few become the survivals of the fittest, and candidates for positions among the immortals. Each century sees a dropping out of a considerable part, so that the names which remain on the roll of fame two thousand years after they lived do not require the folios of the modem biographical dictionary to contain them. It will be a puzzle to the antiquarians of two thousand years hence, recovering beautifully executed heads in marble or bronze of very interesting looking men, to decide whether they were nobodies in history, or if they may represent some of the names whose work has been immortalized in literature. In the days when Greece Was the light of the world, all of her great men were done in marble, and well done. In Rome, afterwards, they were as generally done, but, I think, not quite so well done. As Rome overgrew Greece all the fine arts became its glory also. For a few centuries before and after Julius Caesar, nearly every citizen who acquired reputation or notoriety in Rome was likely to be well or badly portraited by some sculptor. Those who were very prominent in public affairs, especially if they were rich, were likely to find good artists ; but this general rule was as likely to have had exceptions then as now. Distinguished sculptors sometimes make bad work in portraiture ; and some periods do not develop great artists. Of most Greek and Roman celebrities there remain many good likenesses, while of Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian few, very few, portraitures are found, though great men doubtless existed in as great proportion among those nations as among those who learned to crystallize them in stone or to embalm them in literature.

Julius Caesar, born one hundred years before Christ, is distinguished apart from all the other great names of antiquity in being recognized as standing on the dividing line between the antique and the modern world. Anthony Trollope declares that his Commentaries are the beginning of modern history. He may be said, figuratively, to have set his heel on the old forms of government, and to have blazed the way for something new and untried, based on popular suffrage, guarded by a sufficient central power. He is among those extraordinary men of all time who not only came into life on a high plane, but was endowed to adorn that level. He was born great, educated to be great, had lofty ambitions to be useful to his country, as well as to be powerful in it, and worked with unflagging resolution to effect reforms in many ways. His personal presence seems to have been one to attract attention, to make friends, and to make enemies. He was early so conspicuous in Rome that before he had attained middle age he had filled every grade of Roman civil service, and had been elected to the highest religious office. Naturally we might expect such a man to be produced in marble by the sculptors even before his military career began. Afterwards, when military glory the most remarkable had placed him at the summit of human power, we know by the literature of his day, as we shall show further on, that his statues were set up in nearly every city on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Though himself never either king or emperor in Rome, his name became more illustrious in its history than that of any king, consul, or general who preceded him, and greater than any of the long line of historic emperors who followed him. Two thousand years have passed since he was the world's greatest actor, and at the end of those twenty centuries he grows greater and not less, as the erudition of impartial historians of our own time, delving more exhaustively than ever before into the literary records of his period, reveal that his life was like a broad beam of light thrown across the murky atmosphere of a semibarbarous world. They show him to have been the greatest executive reformer of all Roman history, as Christ was soon after the greatest moral reformer for all mankind. In the opinion of Mommsen, the Nestor of living German historians, he was the greatest man of all history. This opinion is shared by most distinguished English and French historians of our time.

What more natural than to expect that the city in which this man was born, lived, and became head of all things, would even at the end of two thousand years have busts and statues of him, which, like those that have come down to us of Demosthenes and Seneca, would give us a similar assurance, an instinctive sense, of life-likeness. It is not so. Spending a second winter in Rome in 1896-7, visiting again its multitudinous art collections, I kept an eye out particularly for antique originals of Julius Csesar. At the same time I frequented the art salesrooms to find a reduced bronze copy of some authentic original. I found none. Several shop-worn, life-size marble heads were found, which the salesmen were ready to offer for his. On inquiry as to where the originals were to be seen, information was lacking. It seemed a habit of mind among some dealers in copies of antique heads to consider certain busts of Roman emperors a sort of interchangeable stock from which the one desired might be produced, provided the purchaser had no clear conception of the features of the one inquired for. This uncertainty among dealers in Rome concerning authentic busts of the great Julius piqued and stimulated curiosity. There floated in my memory reminiscences of engravings of Caesar that I had seen many years before, and a more vivid remembrance of a few busts and statues recently seen. Of the busts, that of the British Museum was one, and the colossal marble head of the Naples Museum was the other.

The statues were two on the floor of the gallery of the Roman emperors of the Louvre, Paris, (utterly dissimilar) and the statue of the Court of the Conservatori of the Capitoline Hill, Rome. From seeing either one of these, I would not, at first sight, conclude that the others were of the same man, though the Naples bust and the Roman statue, when studied, soon assert identity of original. I had seen those busts and statues of him before my interest and curiosity had been fully aroused. After discovering the nebulous condition of knowledge of this subject, even in Rome, I determined to see all his busts and statues again, to make a critical study and comparison among them, and to obtain photographs, drawings, or casts of every marble or bronze that could be found assuming to be of him. To do this intelligently, one must necessarily become acquainted with the writings of the archaeologists and iconographists who have studied and verified antiques. Running down and examining the authorities concerning antique portraitures of Julius Caesar now in existence, I found the study classified for me by the able researches of a very recent writer, Professor J. J. Bernoulli of the University of Basle. His work, Rbmische Ikonographie? published in 1882, is, as near as may be, the condensation of previous lore on its various subjects ; and the source from which more recent writers have drawn to enliven our knowledge of Julius Cassar portraiture. In that work he has listed sixty statues and busts, antiques, or reasonably supposed antiques, with terse notes upon them ; but has given plates or cuts of but eleven : — those previously best known. Of course word descriptions are of little value to give true impressions either of living persons or of works of art. Forty-nine of his numbers have no pictorial representation, either in his work, or elsewhere. In the beginning of my interest in the subject I had no expectation to do more than collect photographs or casts for the most complete collection possible of my subject ; but as the search progressed, additional heads came to light that were not in Bernoulli's list, some exceedingly interesting ; and at last I found myself in possession of more materials than my most worthy masters and predecessors.

When those in the museums of the Vatican were compared with the heads previously seen, a feeling of astonishment came over me that physiognomies so dissimilar had been conceded by competent authorities to be of the same person. Busts with faces even less closely related to those first seen were

1 In German. Published by Verlag von W. Spemann, Stuttgart. 3 volumes.

found in other collections in Rome ; some more nearly related were afterwards seen in Florence, Pisa, Parma, Turin ; and at last in every great capital in Europe. The incredulity which had taken root in my mind as to the certainty that any of them were portraits of Julius Caesar, wore slowly away. Faith and ideals which had been shaken and confused revived, and became more and more clear. Ideals of the real presence of the man began to shape themselves out of the aggregate of the imperfect marbles preserved. The spirit of inquiry, a rage of curiosity, which had been aroused, opened the vistas of knowledge. The study became an engrossing hobby that lent zest to travel, and finally bore me during four years to all the great museums of Europe, and into many private art collections, to search for, and to compare all the materials that have come down to us, antique, mediaeval, or renaissance, which may throw light on the features and head of Julius Caesar. With ample time to visit art collections where his effigy is catalogued among the antiques, I found the study of them to be increasingly interesting, by reason of the ever varying differences in features and expression. It became more and more instructive in opening my mind to see the resemblances, the common individuality, between many of the heads where at first view I had remarked only the dissimilarities. The researches of Italian archaeologists have not absolutely identified any statue or bust of Caesar as of his life-time, or the work of any sculptor who worked in Rome while he was a living presence there. Yet tradition dimly lights the way, and circumstantial evidences multiply, to inspire conviction that the great

Coins with Cesar's Head, in the Museum of Naples

Italian art writers have not erred in fixing upon certain antique statues and busts as having been executed in Caesar's time as portraits of him ; and others as probable studies executed after other antiques of him which are not now in existence.

Many of the coins issued near the end of his dictatorship have the assumed effigy of his head in profile upon them. These are not traditions, but hard facts. While some of these effigies are simply symbolical of one or another of the offices he held, others are evidently very clumsy attempts to portray Caesar's profile, — some of them being caricatures of it. Scholarly Italians, and antiquarians of other countries who have made a study of old coins, have settled upon those which may be considered genuine, and of Caesar's own issue. But as to which of these profiles may be worst or best, we may have opinions, and such general agreement as may carry weight, but we have no certainties.

It must be borne in mind that neither coins, medals, statues, or busts, came down to us in carefully guarded museums during the sixteen hundred years after Caesar, and preceding the modern museum. The coins have been revealed by the plough, by excavations in scores of old Roman cities, in hiding-places of old walls, in sewers and wells, in river-beds, and in beach sands, washed to light by the waves of the sea. They have been preserved in the hoards of antiquarians, and in the cabinets of the wealthy. At last they are mostly gathered into the public museums of the great capitals. All the shores of the Mediterranean, and the soils of the countries bordering upon it, still continue to yield up coin souvenirs of the notable men of old Rome. By the kindness of Signor Jules Petra, director of the Museum of Naples, of M. Babelon, director of the department of coins and medals of the Biblioiheque Nationale of Paris, and of the very courteous keepers of the coins and gems of the British Museum, London, I am able to present the accompanying photogravures of the most valuable (as likenesses) of the antique coins bearing his effigy. The photographs are taken from plaster casts ordered for me by the directors of the museums respectively, from which a much clearer relief can be obtained than from the originals. The latter are so dark, discoloured, and corroded by time that the photographer cannot make satisfactory work from them.

The coins bearing Julius Caesar's profile, or caricatures of it, ordered when he was perpetual dictator, and issued just before or soon after his death, have been considered the most fundamental data for knowing his features. I do not think them so. They are too widely different one from another, and too bad as art works to count for much in portraiture. But they cannot be ignored, and must be studied and compared; not only with each other, but with every statue, bust, or head that bears proof of having been intended for him, and of sufficient antiquity to indicate it to be of the Caesarean era, or a study from antiques of that time. Among all these the diversities of feature and expression range widely apart ; but the careful study of many able and cautious Italian scholars and iconographists during the last four centuries has brought a large agreement upon points of resemblance. Fortified by ample descriptions of Caesar in Roman literature of his time, these agreements combine to

PLATE III

Paris Coins show clearly to the modern student, however sceptical he may be in the beginning, that Caesar's lineaments are surely known, however shamefully some of the coins and busts may caricature him. The coins are a motley shabby lot. But we must remember that they were issued in a revolutionary period, at the very close of his life, after an absence from Rome of nine years in Gaul, succeeded by five years of hasty visits to the capital, in interludes between adventurous campaigns far from it. These short returns assuredly allowed him no time to pose for die-cutters or sculptors. Money had to be issued quickly and copiously, without reference to the artistic merit of the dies, or the resemblance of the profiles to Caesar. Some of the effigies on his coins were designed to typify his pontifical office, — the head drapery being more important in the workman's eyes than the features under it. Some aimed to represent Caesar's profile, but made apprentice work of it. Others contented themselves with wild approximations, seemingly without care for accuracy. A few are caricatures : as if the artists were in sympathy with his enemies, and in his absence took malicious pleasure in using the graver to belittle the conqueror. It was not a period of artistic excellence of any kind. The gravers' and the sculptors' arts had come to the highest perfection before Caesar's time, and reached it again after it, in the reigns of the emperors Augustus and Hadrian. But the whole revolutionary period preceding, during, and after his time, was not an era of good art work.

When we think of the strain on body and mind endured by Caesar during the last fourteen years of his life, it is easy to realize that the handsome young " ladies' man " and politician, the stately senator, orator, jurist, governor, and consul, all of which positions he had filled before leaving Rome, had come back at the end of his nine years of explorations and campaigning in Gaul much aged, and marked by lines of care. Still more must he have been worn by the anxieties of the Civil War which followed, with its four years of incessant struggles under the burning sun of Greece, Egypt, Syria, Carthage, Spain. A thin-cheeked, bony-faced, lean-necked man is shown in the profiles which the engravers who caught sight of him in the few days he remained at the capital, have produced on the coin dies. Some of them emphasized the sinewy but not large neck, the angular under jaw, and the hollow cheek ; others, the rather prominent nose, and the strongly marked but not large chin. A full, high, intellectual forehead, and a long head, are common to many of the profiles, which do not resemble each other otherwise ; while on some he is shown with a characterless profile and an insignificant head. The large, mobile mouth had little chance of being expressed on the profiles of small coins; so that concerning this most expressive of all the features, the coins suggest little of value, and we are forced to rely for this feature on descriptions of his person by contemporaries, and on the statues and busts conceded to be of him. By comparison of all the coins of his time bearing his profile, or the symbols of his offices, one soon learns to put aside some of them as too bad to warrant further attention, and to see in the others certain repeated peculiarities that furnish our human instinct and reason some data for conclusions. In connection with literary descriptions and allusions to him in his day, and with the busts and statues identified as of him, we are led to clearer and clearer views of which of them may be good, or partly good, and which of them must be bad, or very bad.