Join us for an evening with author and journalist Charlotte Higgins and classicist Mary Beard.
Higgins is Chief culture writer for the Guardian and author of Under Another Sky . Her new book, Greek Myths, is a dazzling depiction of some of the most enduring stories of all time. From goddess of war Athena and banished sorceress Circe, to loyal Penelope and Helen of Troy, this powerful retelling allows female characters to take centre stage.
Mary Beard is a TV presenter, author and professor of classics at Cambridge, whose own work has deeply explored the societies and culture of Roman and Greek civilisations.
Together they will discuss Higgins’s reworking of these powerful stories of unpredictable gods, epic wars, and families turned murderously against each other, which explore the extremes of human experience. They will also be answering your questions at this livestreamed event.
What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars,” from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns.
Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority.
From Beard’s reconstruction of Titian’s extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII’s famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created.
Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC