A Don’s Life

When did the toga go out of fashion?

I'm hard at work on my "Twelve Caesars" lectures in Washington. And I'm thinking about the question of how, why and when modern, living people were represented, in portraits statues, wearing Roman dress -- like Pitt the Younger by Nollekens, above.

There have been flurries of interest in particular aspects of this question (in, for example, the tirade of Joshua Reynolds against Benjamin West, for doing his painting of the Death of Wolfe, below, in modern, rather than Roman, kit). But my question is a bigger one. When, in the mainstream tradition of Anglo-American portrait sculpture does it become simply unthinkable to put your sitter in a toga or Roman armour? It was an option often taken, though never exclusive, from the beginning of the modern tradition of portraiture, in the fifteenth century century on. When did it start to seem silly? (We cant, after all imagine David Cameron, JFK or even Churchill being sculpted 'all'antica".)

And a related, but significantly different question, is: which is the latest mainstream portrait we can find, in which the sitter is portrayed in Roman costume?

Slash and burn at the Museum of London

I may be in the USA but I still get word of terrible things going on in the UK. The latest bit of gossip to reach me is the plan to make most of the senior pre-modern curators at the Museum of London redundant.

Now I have a great soft spot for this Museum, and indeed have often taken students there. It has a wonderful Roman collection, and what used to be a state of the art display of Roman London ...now a bit in need of a revamp, but in fact I went to a meeting a year or so ago which was taking soundings about exactly how that should be planned. Anyway  now it seems like the revamp is on hold, but even worse the senior curatorial staff are being "let go".

If anyone knows more about this than I do, please let me know.

Dream School, Jamie Oliver and me

You might already have got wind of something I have been keeping a bit quiet about. I have been one of the teachers on Jamie Oliver's "Dream School" project -- a sort-of reality tv series in which a series of celebs, poets, politicians and academics teach a group of 20 kids, all of whom have ended up without 5 GCSEs at grades A to C. The project lasted six weeks or so, and I think I had 4 lessons -- all filmed.

My job was to teach them Latin.

Many hadn't done any foreign language past the age of 14... let alone something as structured as Latin. Most of them started out with some pretty decided views on what was and wasnt useful in life. So why do it?

Well,the bottom line is that it would have been cowardly and hypocritical not to take it on. If, like me, you go round shooting your mouth off about how great a subject Latin is -- then someone says why not come and have a go teaching our tv class . . . well it's a bit hard to say 'thanks, but no thanks'.

Was it wise? Probably not. But I got a lot further than I thought I might.

Mubarak and Ben Ali: what would Tacitus say?

So the story is that Mubarak and Ben Ali are now both desperately ill -- indeed, it is said, in a coma. And there have been a handful of sharp comments, wondering what the "Deposed Dictator Syndrome" (DDS) actually is -- and how convenient it might be as a protective device against assassination.

I couldn't help thinking how Roman it all looked. There is a whole series of similar scenarios, brilliantly concocted by the brilliant Tacitus (I say 'concocted' because he cant possibly have known what went on). They are all centred on the grimy last moments of autocrats and dictators.

The basic rule for Tacitus is that despots don't die a natural death. In the midst of a power struggle they get smothered or poisoned, while the word is put out that they have been struck down by some nasty illness. Alternatively, they have long died (and this is more the 'Soviet president scenario'), while the word is put out that he is still hanging on to life -- until the new emperor is ready to be presented to the troops and the people. Livy even manages to retroject this scenario to the earliest kings of Rome, and has Tanaquil easing Servius Tullius onto the throne, by carefully managing the death of Tarquinius Priscus. (And it is the emperor Tiberius at the top of this post.)

It's not hard to invent what Tacitus might have to say about the roles of Susan Mubarak, Gamal, Alaa, Suleiman -- and a few strategically placed pillows and poisoned mushrooms. There is a difference though. Tacitus' stories were all about ensuring the succession of some favoured, or not so favoured, son. Whatever family disputes went on before these guys decided to cave in, they have presumably given up all hope of imperial style dynasty. Here the aim is presumably to avoid (as DDS has it) the assassin's bullet -- or to ensure the succession of the wealth, even if not the political office itself.

Let illness take its course.

CASVA: an office to die for

'
I am just getting settled in at the the National Gallery in Washington DC, where I am based at CASVA (the Center for the Advanced Studies of the Visual Arts) - busy preparing my lectures on the "Twelve Caesars".

The truth is that I have loads of ideas on this, and some amazing new stuff that I'm sure most people won't know about. But, for better or worse, I haven't yet got The Big Idea. But there is still six weeks to go (and actually it seems to me that it may be 'for better' not to have the big idea .. never quite sure how crudifying those 'big ideas' are).

But if there was any place you could get a Big Idea, it would be CASVA.

The picture at the top is the view from my office.

Where does "King Tut" belong?

Tactless it may be, but I have been itching to say this for several days. The sad looting of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo gives yet another reason why the dispersal of major treasures around the world may be a good thing, not an imperialist crime.

I don't mean that everything should end up in the British Museum (or the Met, or the Louvre). In the medium to long term, we can't be certain which parts of the world are going to be safest -- whether that is a question or crime, riot, flood or fire. Over the next millennium London may be no less vulnerable than Kabul But we do know that 'all eggs in one basket' is bound to be a bad idea.

Only a year or so ago, Zahi Hawass was on the Today programme complaining that all the masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art were not in Egypt.

I hope he is eating his words.

Grumpy old don

I fear that this post will bring accusations that I am gradually morphing into a curmudgeonly, conservative donnish equivalent of a Daily Mail reader. But here goes.

In between the news from Egypt this week (the son has plans to return on Sunday...???), I did find time to have a look at the BBC Trust's report on Radio 4. Now some of this was rather sensible; credit where it is due. They are right, for example, to point to the dominance of the USA at the expense of Europe in foreign news reporting (not entirely unconnected with the fact that (most) US politicians seak English, I suspect). But the fixation with broadening the listener base and capturing the 'replenishing' at an earlier age sends shivers down the spine.

Who ever would argue that Radio One ought to be aiming to reach more elderly listeners (more oldies and Vera Lynn)?

The great Roman emperor hunt

I am about to go to Washington to finish preparing my Roman emperor lectures. I think I have already said that the idea is to look at the images of Roman emperors from antiquity to, more or less, the present day. This turns out to have been a bit of an over-achievement, as Roman emperors were all over the place from the fifteenth century on -- and in the last few days I have been to see some brilliant stone emperors at Salisbury Hall, some equally brilliant early Roman kings (plus the emperor Augustus) at Lullingstone Castle, and a whole load of emperors, may-be emperors and almost-certainly-not-emperors at Hampton Court.

But some of the real puzzles remain are in a quite different medium. I shall fill you in later on the wonderful silver Aldobrandini Tazze (worth a few years of a research project in their own right). But I wonder if anyone can help with one question . . . about the tremendously in-your-face series of emperors, like the Tiberius at the top of this post.

Tiberius is a ceramic masterpiece, made by an Italian ceramicist, Angelo Minghetti, in the late nineteenth century -- and he is in the V and A. This museum also has a matching Caligula and Domitian (a nice trio of villains). Meanwhile there are two others -- Julius Caesar and Nero -- in Dublin; another two -- Titus and Vespasian -- in Geneva; a Claudius in Lisbon and an Augustus in Bologna (I havent managed to get an image of either of these, so if anyone has one I would be very grateful).

That makes nine. Presumably there were originally 12 .. as in Suetonius. OK, it's possible that Minghetti decided to leave out the three we dont have (Galba, Otho and Vitellius) on the grounds that they were so shortlived that they didn't deserve a big, expensive bust to themselves. But if so, he would have been unlike most Western artists since the fifteenth century. 12 was the rule.

So where are my final three. Maybe broken. But they are pretty recognisable. So if anyone out there has seen one of these (and if you had, I dont think you'd forget) -- do let me know where they are. And you'll get full credits.

As a postscript, let me just give a tribute to the museums (especially the V and A, and the BM) and all the private owners, who have helped in my emperor hunt. It must be a pain in the butt to have someone email and say... err, I am going to the USA next week, but can I see your dish/bust/cup on Weds or Thursday. But everyone has found a time and gone way beyond the call of duty. It is that kind of availabilty, just as much as, if not more than, online speed, that give British research its distinctive style and distinction. Thank you all.

Cairo: the escape route from civil war

Yesterday morning the son knew things were changing in Cairo. I see the point of OurSally's comment on the last post. But it does seem that up till then the Egyptian revolution (like many revolutions, I imagine) had its domestic, even home-spun side. OK -- deadly and scary, messianic and liberating, but simultaneously human and even occasionally comic.

The son couldn't help laughing when the woman from the flat downstairs came up to complain about him and his flatmates making a noise moving the furniture around, when only half an hour earlier they had all been deafened by the "buzzing" of the Egyptian army jets. And his description of the well-meaning (and so far as I can tell honourable) group of locals who manned the security on his street has a slightly Homeguard tinge to it. They made a great show of checking people's ID, but he never saw them turn anyone away.

So far so good. But we realised that it was changing on Wednesday morning. He said that he had heard rumours that 'something' was going to happen -- and he was going to stay in.

Later that day he and his flatmates knew they must leave.

Live from Cairo

Well almost live from Cairo. This is the son's account of last Friday, which has just reached me -- plus pictures by his friend Dylan Sodaro.Things have moved on since than, but this gives aflavour of what has been happening:

"Hearty breakfast at Qazaz. All forms of communication are down.

We listened to the Friday sermon on our balcony. The atmosphere is very eerie. Within about ten minutes of the end of Friday prayers the worshippers of a local mosque come marching towards Tahrir square. However, their destination is completely blocked by police in riot gear. It is this time that we decided to dip our toes in the waters of protest. We walk towards Talaat Harb street but there is not much action going on. At one point it looks like something very nasty is going to happen. A group of about 15 men with motorcycle helmets and sticks advance on the police. In my naïveté I thought that they would attack the police (they had no signs of being police men) but when they reach the lines of riot police they are welcomed into the fold. These men were the infamous plain clothes police thugs who were apparently targeting journalists later on in the day.