Twelve Caesars
By Mary Beard
- Genre
- Art, Culture & Creative Life
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9780691222363
Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern is an art-history book by the classicist Mary Beard, published by Princeton University Press in 2021. Drawn from her Mellon Lectures, it traces depictions of the Roman emperors across Western art. It was named a best history...
Why has Western art spent two thousand years depicting the same twelve Roman emperors, most of them long dead before anyone painted them? Mary Beard's Twelve Caesars follows those familiar faces - Julius Caesar, Nero, Caligula and the rest - through the coins, busts, tapestries and canvases that carried their image across centuries. The Cambridge classicist is characteristically sharp on how power borrows the authority of Rome, how forgeries and misidentifications proliferate, and how a marble head can lie. Drawn from her Mellon Lectures and lavishly illustrated, the book is scholarship worn lightly, curious and frequently funny. intendle recommends it for readers interested in art, history or the long afterlife of political power. A best history book of 2021 for Waterstones and Barnes & Noble, it rewards slow looking. By the end you will never glance at an emperor's portrait the same way, or trust a label under a Roman bust quite so readily.