At first glance, it is difficult to believe that the three images of Julius Caesar (102-44 B. C.) in the Getty Museum are of the same person. They look like three entirely different people, but a common likeness clearly links them together. But is there any real likeness of this great man? The many different presentations of Caesar’s personality surely reflect the varying political and social overtones associated with the founder of the Roman Empire.
5 The condition and artistic quality of all three Getty heads is not outstanding, and the piece which was once the finest (called the McLendon Caesar) has suffered most over the ages. One can guess at its features, but enough remains of the profile to compare it with coins struck just before the violent death of the benevolent dictator in 44 B. C. (fig, 8). This image of Caesar survives in several sculptured variants preserving Caesar’s amazingly asymmetrical skull, which must have been an anatomical peculiarity, his receding hairline, and his lean, weathered skin. These features are politely minimized on the coins where Caesar is given abundant hair. On the other hand, the coins also describe unflinchingly the scrawny wrinkled skin of his neck and his prominent Adam’s apple.
The other sculptural variants of this portrait are closer to the original image than is our head. The sculptor, working in Asia Minor (as indicated by the marble type) was perhaps influenced by the idealized portraits of early Hellenistic rulers. He ironed out some of the unpleasant features. Our replica may be Augustan, a period which found the memory of Caesar politically very useful to the new regime. There is something very real and appealing in this image. In spite of the unpretentious level of craftsmanship and its ruined state, we can still perceive the image of a man who united a firm hand and a generous mind, a man of Roman auctoritas tempered by Greek paideia, a man of ambition who wanted to serve, a true Roman devoted equally urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world. More than in the two other images, the sculptor seems to have participated in the exaltation which Caesar must have inspired.
6. The Bliicher Caesar
The head belonged to a statue with its head covered by a veil, representing Caesar as the pontifex maximus, the supreme priest of Rome, and dating from the very end of the first century B. C. The portrait type, on the other hand, belongs to the effigy based on Caesar’s death mask of 44 B. C.
6 The second Caesar belonged to the descendants of General Bliicher, the victor of Waterloo. The Bliicher head was modified from a prototype intended to be seen from all around, and was prepared to be inserted in a statue with the head covered by the toga. Thus the sitter was represented as a sacrifiant, perhaps recalling the supreme religious office of Pontifex Maximus which gave Caesar and all his successors a special status. Consequently, the modeling of the sides, back, and top of the head is sketchy, and the whole orientation of the face is rather grim and set. This modification of the type has prompted some authorities to question the identification as Caesar. A technical detail, however, acts strongly in favor of this head being a portrait of a famous person. Above the forehead on both sides are two small rounded indented protuberances (puntelli) that were not effaced after the process of reproduction. They demonstrate that the Bliicher Caesar is a reproduction of a well-known type and thus a celebrity. A careful reading of the features points to the second version of Caesar’s iconography, which seems to derive from the death mask that historical sources mention having been displayed before and during his funeral. The lips, which are stiff and slightly sagging at the corners, the protruding cheek bones, and the sunken flesh of the cheeks suggests the facies hippocratica, the death mask. The eyes are lifeless, having been made “classical” according to the standard convention of improving images from death masks. The artist attempted to overcome the frozen grimace of death but succeeded only partially. Our replica, carved in Italian marble, is more pedestrian than the best examples of this second type, but it still reveals how Caesar disdained his own end, knowing well that the brave die but once. The dry execution of the Italian craftsman suggests the very end of the first century B. C., when Augustus was well established as Caesar’s heir.
7 The third example, the Getty Caesar, is a colossal sculpture with an elongated neck, carved to be dropped into a draped statue body. The representation provides us with a monumental and simplified vision of the man, evoked as the founder of the Empire. The coins of Caesar struck under the emperor Trajan (A. D. 98-117) provide an excellent analogy (fig. 12): the simplified features and the summary modeling were intended for view from afar. One can visualize the statue exhibited as part of a group in a temple of the divinized Trajan such as built at Pergamon. Our colossal Caesar may then have been the first in the series of an imperial portrait gallery demonstrating the uninterrupted sequence of the rulers of Rome. The rounded skull, heavy eyebrows, generally rounded face, and massive structure of the forehead strongly suggest the appearance of Trajan whose likeness may have been projected here onto his famous predecessor. Trajan surely did not order the conflation of his and Caesar’s likenesses, and the sculptor may not have been conscious of this assimilation. The idea of the perennial Empire had already been expressed by Tiberius when, tempering the Senate’s mourning of Augustus, he declared: principes mortales res publica aeterna.
World History
