Margarita-Ana Vázquez-Manassero
The National Distance Education University, Madrid, Spain
In 1536 Federico Gonzaga commissioned the series of paintings of “Twelve Caesars” from Titian for the decoration of his namesake gabinetto at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. It was a new archaeological and heroic interpretation of the Roman Antiquity, based on ancient medals and busts.
This series, nowadays lost, were bought by Philip II of Spain for decorating the old Alcázar of Madrid. Likewise, Spanish Monarchy sculpture collection began with the acquisition of five complete series of busts of the Twelve Caesars during the reign of Philip II. Thus, from the late 16th century, the Spanish Court, begins a recovery of these images of Classical Antiquity as “heroic ideal” while the Habsburgs transformed Twelve Caesars’ representations into an instrument for the legitimization of the classical provenance of its dynasty, as well as into the image of its military triumphs.
This paper focuses on the analysis of modern reinterpretation and the dissemination mechanisms of this Twelve Emperor’s images, from the arrival of Titian’s series at the old Alcázar of Madrid to the end of 17th century. On the one hand, those representations of the Twelve Caesars’ that decorated palaces of the Spanish Monarchy will be identified, as well as the use of this iconography as a means of glorification of the Habsburg Emperors triumphal entries.
On the other hand, this collecting practices and the taste of the Spanish monarchs for the representations of Twelve Caesars’ would be emulated by the Spanish nobility of the time. Through identifying representations of the Twelve Caesars in the inventories of contemporary art collections of the Spanish nobility and providing new documentary evidences relating to commissions of such series, shall be established the remarkable diffusion reached by this classical Emperor’s images,
transformed during the Spanish Golden Age into the representation of the modern warrior.