Roman Emperors

How much can we tell about the characters of these famous names from their marble representations? Not much, I fancy. It’s only by reading into their actual lives that we can get an impression, and even then contemporary or near-contemporary biographers like Livy or Tacitus or Suetonius often had their own agendas and their own necks to consider. Busts produced for domestic display were mostly designed to give succeeding generations a sense of where they came from and the values they were expected to uphold, so a certain dignity of mien was always to be expected. In the case of the emperors, it was also about projecting an image, the nimbus of authority that later rulers like Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, in the mass-produced images they liked to sponsor, exploited to the full.

I’m confident we can trust the likenesses of the busts themselves – there seems to be enough individuality and congruence for us to rely on that consensus – but otherwise, particularly in the case of the emperors and their offspring, their images were designed to underline their political and societal bona fides, and were as much about inspiring confidence and imposing their will as they were about reinforcing the profiles on the coinage, hence they generally look sober, serious and weighty. (The only real exception, to my eye, is Caligula, whose malignity seems manifest, but that’s only because I knew someone at school whose head was similarly flat at the back, and he had the same mad and vicious tendencies… though of course one can never rely on such phrenological cobblers when trying to establish the real truth about anyone, and my schoolmate had neither a favourite horse nor a couple of nubile sisters, as far as I’m aware…)

It was interesting that the prominent Romans suddenly started sprouting beards around the start of the second century. Previously they had all been scrupulously plucked bare by their slaves at the baths daily, until suddenly up rocks this Spanish ponce Hadrian with a growth like a badger’s scrotum, and thereafter they all had to have one. As an amateur student of social fashions, one is mildly intrigued. As an artist, one is pissed off having to do all that extra work.