Portraits of Twelve Caesars
Titian’s Lost Paintings Restaged with Historical Sources and Museum Artifacts
My 2020 Roman Emperor Project began in isolation during the pandemic using available online images and early ‘AI’ tools. Using the funds generated from prints and image licensing, I embarked on a journey across Europe, visiting museums and capturing high-resolution photographs and 3D scans of ancient busts. My first project using this research is a to revisit the first twelve “Caesars” inspired by an etching that I have been obsessed with for years.
To match the composition of Titian’s lost paintings, marble has been re-posed. The face’s style still references the several marble busts from the 2020 project but shape and expression mostly conforms to a single marble bust to retain subtle facial expressions that would otherwise be lost when averaging faces. Again, to avoid idealized imagery, these portraits were aged to reflect the ruler’s appearance at their reign’s end (excluding major illness), drawing again on insights from primary sources like Suetonius’s (69 AD — 122 AD) gossipy book The Twelve Caesars (c. 119 AD).
🖼️ Print available until December 31st 2024. Only through Etsy.
NOTE ON ETHICS AND AI ART
I take AI ethics seriously. I believe AI should be developed and used an ethical manner and this is best archived through legislation that incentivizes consent-based databases. That said, I want to speak to the numerous ‘AI’ tools that were used in this project including two that fall into an ethical grey area.
Tools like StyleGAN (via Artbreeder) and Generative fill (Adobe Photoshop) have used either Creative Commons or licensed images in the datasets used to trains their models. In a narrow sense, I consider their current use ethical. Other tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been developed in ways I consider less ethical or unethical— trained on datasets scraped from artists without their permission or consent (I began testing workflows for this project in 2022 using Stable Diffusion and was later abandoned after further consideration). A third category are tools like Gigapixel AI that don’t have any information regarding their dataset. For the latter two categories, one can use them with varying degrees of ethics (E.g. A more ethical approach is to not prompt living artists names).
For this project, I mostly used tools from the ethical category and two from the mysterious category in a way that I consider as ethical as possible. I used it because, based on Adobe’s current research, it seems like it is months away from releasing generative upscale and style transfer using a ethically sourced dataset. Delaying the project any further would have resulted in it not existing.
Gaius Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar did not have an official reign as Emperor, but held power from 49–44 BC. He died age 58, assassinated.
Much debate surrounds the ‘most accurate’ ancient marble head of Caesar. Rather than enter the debate I simply chose my favorite due to the craftmanship. This Chiaramonte-Pisa style head, according to Paul Zanker, “may have originated in the middle of the Augustan period” (via Companion to Julius Caesar) and is now housed in the Vatican. Since no ancient marble exists of a clothed Caesar, I referenced a sculpture by Andrea Ferrucci from 1514 housed in the MET, New York City.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus
Augustus reigned from 27 BC — 14 AD and died age 76 of natural causes.
Portrait based on the Prima Porta statue in the Vatican. The marble statue is believed to be a copy of a lost original bronze piece made sometime after 20 BC. To obtain a eye-level view of the head which is ~10ft from the ground, a 3D scan with photogrammetry was made.
Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus
Tiberius reigned from 14–37 AD and died age 78 of natural causes.
Head is from the ROM, Toronto Canada. Dated about 14–37 CE (ROM Collections). Body and clothing directly from Titian (via engraver Aegidius Sadeler II c. 1593).
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus
Caligula reigned from 37–41 AD and died age 29, assassinated.
Head and body from an ancient marble bust housed in Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen Denmark. Found in Rome and believed to be made sometime during his reign (via museum placard and DAInst).
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus
Claudius reigned from 41–54 AD and died age 63, likely poisoned.
Head with civic wreath on modern bust in the Farnese Collection (MANN) Naples, Italy. Placard reads “White marble head on modern bust. […] according to a portrait type developed in AD 41 after his ascension to the throne.”
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus
Nero reigned from 54–68 AD and died age 31 by suicide.
Head is partially ancient marble with the rest from the 17th century (see below). The body is also from the Capitoline Museums, Rome but the head was too idealized to form the basis of my portrait. The museum placard reads “Nero is wearing an anatomical cuirass and a paludamentum (short mantle) on his left shoulder. The cuirass is decorated in the center with the monstrous face of Medusa who petrified whoever looked at her. This decoration was very frequent on imperators’ cuirasses for its protective function, as well as the cingulum, a belt with a herculean knot, at the bottom of the bust.”
NOTE ON 69 AD “YEAR OF THE FOUR EMPERORS”: Few if any busts exist for Galba, Otho and Vitellius the emperors with short reigns in the chaotic year of 69 AD. For these emperors I simply chose the bust based on craftmanship and similarity to coinage.
Servius Sulpicius Galba
Galba reigned 68–69 AD and died age 70, assassinated.
Capitoline museum bust has been heavily reworked and restored as Galba (via museum placard and DAInst). Museum placard reads “Male portrait restored as Galba. Marble, late Republican period (late 1st cent. B.C.) Formerly in the Albani collection”
Marcus Salvius Otho
Otho reigned for a few months in 69 AD and died age 36 from a forced suicide.
I referenced a 16th c. bust (via museum placard) in Uffizi gallery, Florence. Otho was bald and wore a hairpiece which looked uncanny and repetitive even in coinage. Details missing in Titian’s portrait.
Aulus Vitellius
Vitellius reigned for 8 months in 69 AD until he was assassinated age 59.
Portrait based on a full-length statue at the Louvre. The head is a recreation. There is no academic consensus on their being a surviving head from antiquity. The one ancient head of Vitellius in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Denmark has little value in a portrait because the damnatio memoriae makes him look a bit like a worm.
Vespasian
Vespasian reigned from 69–79 AD and died age 69 of natural causes (possibly dysentery).
Head and body based on bust in Uffizi Gallery, Florence. According to the museum placard, the origin of the bust is unknown but it claims to have been “on display by 1704”. The museum placard also dates it to the “late 1st century AD”. My amateur opinion is that the nose and body may not be ancient.
Titus Caesar Vespasianus
Titus reigned from 79–81 AD and died age 41 of natural causes (possibly a fever).
Head from ancient marble in British Museum dated “about AD 70–81” found in Utica Tunisia (via museum placard and DAInst). Body and clothing directly from Titian (via engraver Aegidius Sadeler II c. 1593).
Domitian
Domitian reigned from 81–96 AD and died age 44, assassinated.
Head based on an ancient marble statue from Altes Museum, Berlin which dates it to 81 AD. The placard notes “The locks of hair brushed forward onto the forehead are for covering the beginning of baldness”. Body is based on one housed in the Louvre, Paris. According to the placard, the head is ancient but the body is from 18th century. The general pose is not Titian this time who only did eleven of twelve Caesars. The twelfth was by another Italian renaissance artist Giulio Romano.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Voshart lives and works in Toronto, Canada. This project was made possible by the sale of prints of The Roman Emperor Project and a small, lightweight backpack for budget Airlines.
