The faces of the emperors and their wives are not just of their own time, they re surface eerily throughout the long history. One example is a sculpture that was believed to be almost a hundred percent, certainly wrongly, the emperor vitellius. And what you got on the st now is vereneses later sixteenth century feast in the house of levi. It had been designed as a last supper, as complicated story. But i think there's something knowing about that, that this guy is a servant who cuts the meat. In roman tradition, vitelius is the emperor - but he actually means glutton. So what do we have here?
What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of figures we deplore? In October 2021 Mary Beard, Britain’s best known classicist, came to Intelligence Squared to talk about the ideas in her new book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern.
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