Sculptor edmonia lewis was the first professional african American female sculptor. She set up a shop in rome to great success, making replicas for tourist trade. On the left is her version of what we would now call the young emperor gustus with an image from the vatican on the right. And she also does something much more adventurous, which is a statue that she did of cleopatra. The last few slides are about what you've been telling us the ubiquity of these emperors.
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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