Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts Book 74)

by Mary Beard

For a start, there is an inextricable two-way influence between the old and the new. Unsurprisingly perhaps, modern images of emperors have almost always been produced in imitation of (or in response to) ancient Roman prototypes. That is true, of course, for many classicising themes in art. Every modern version of Jupiter or Venus, of guileless Naiad or of raunchy satyr is the product of some kind of conversation with the art of antiquity. But with these imperial rulers that conversation is especially intense. Modern conventions in the ‘look’ of many individual emperors—from the cool classical profile of Augustus to the shaggy beard of Hadrian—have often been derived from detailed study of surviving Roman art and literature.