This panel depicting the Roman Emperor Claudius originally formed part of one of the most famous and influential courtly decorative schemes in the history of Italian Renaissance art, the decoration of the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua undertaken between 1536 and 1539 for Duke Federico II Gonzaga, 1st Duke of Mantua (1500–1540). Its author, Giulio Pippi (c. 1499–1546) – called Romano after his birthplace – was without question one of the most versatile and influential artists and designers of the late Renaissance and Mannerist periods. The pupil and principal assistant of Raphael himself in Rome, Giulio worked with him on the decorations of the Papal apartments, the Stanze and the Loggia of Leo X. After his master’s death in 1520 he moved in 1524 to the Gonzaga court at Mantua, where for over twenty years he worked as an architect and designer for Duke Federico, leading a large and well-organised workshop supplying frescoes, paintings, tapestries and goldsmith’s work for the Palazzo Ducale and other projects, chief among them the construction of the Palazzo del Te. Giulio’s remarkable creative imagination was never more apparent than in his complex decorative programmes, especially those created in Mantua for the hugely important suite of state rooms in the Palazzo Ducale known as the ‘Appart.mes nto di Troia’, to which this painting once belonged (fig. 1).1 Here it formed part of the elaborate decorative scheme of one of the most important rooms, the Camerino dei Cesari or ‘Cabinet of the Caesars’, designed to display a famous series of portraits of Roman Emperors specifically commissioned from Titian himself.
This portrait of the 1st-century emperor Claudius2 on horseback originally belonged to a set of small panels set into the lower walls of the Camerino dei Cesari. For this room Giulio had designed an elaborate suite of stucco reliefs and niches with statuettes to flank a set of eleven canvases of Roman Emperors commissioned from Titian by Duke Federico in July 1536 and completed in January 1540 (fig. 2).3 The originals are no longer extant, for they were later destroyed by fire in Spain in the eighteenth century,4 but their appearance is recorded by a set of engravings by Aegidius Sadeler (1570–1629) (fig. 3) of circa 1620 and sets of painted copies by the Cremonese painter Bernardino Campi (1522–1591) made from 1562 onwards.5
Right: Fig. 3 Aegidius Sadeler II (after Titian), The Emperor Claudius, c. 1593 and later. Engraving. © Wellcome collects ion
Forming a basamento or dado beneath the portraits were a series of painted wooden panels consisting of eleven favole or histories showing events from the life of the emperor above,6 each flanked by one or two small equestrian portraits of Emperors on horseback. Of the original histories only four now survive: one in the Musée du Louvre in Paris depicting The Triumph of Vespasian and Titus,7 and three in the Royal collects ion at Hampton Court Palace: The Omen of Claudius’s imperial power, The Sacrifice of a goat to Jupiter, and Nero playing while Rome burns.8 Although we cannot now be absolutely certain, there were probably originally at least eleven equestrian Caesars, together with one female figure of Victory.9 The earliest record is a note of 1568 made by the antiquarian and polymath Jacopo Strada (1507-1588) which refers to ‘dodici imperadori… a cavallo, colloriti a olio tutti diversi’ (‘twelve emperors on horseback, painted in oils, all different’).10 Including the present lot, nine of these survive. Three, framed together and once in the collects ion of Louis XIV of France are preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille,11 two apiece in the Royal collects ion at Hampton Court12 and the Fountaine collects ion at Narford Hall, Norfolk (including that of the figure of Victory), and the last, depicting the Emperor Nero, is in the Picture Gallery at Christ Church, Oxford.13
Although the Camerino itself is now sadly much damaged, Jacopo Strada happily had the presence of mind to commission a series of drawings of the room in 1567–68. Now attributed to the local Mantuan artist Ippolito Andreasi (1548–1608), these survive today in the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf and record the appearance of the lower sections of three walls of Giulio Romano’s illusionistic ensemble (fig. 4).14 Thus we see the present panel (see detail fig. 5) on the left-hand end of the west wall, alongside the history of Nero playing while Rome burns (Royal collects ion, Hampton Court) which is flanked on the other side by another equestrian portrait of the emperor Nero (Christ Church, Oxford).15 An inscription in the Andreasi drawing in the stucco(?) roundel above the emperor identifies him as ‘CLAUDIVS CAESAR AUDEM’. A similar roundel below carries an indistinct title, but the word UXOR suggests that, as with other emperors such as Augustus, this may represent one of his four wives.16 The small panels of the emperors on horseback seem to have been fixed to the wall or let into it, and framed with simple gilded fillets, the interstices filled with floral garlands and arabesques in stucco.
With the aid of surviving sections of the room and copies of the Titians it is possible to reconstruct an impression of the completed illusionistic scheme (fig. 6), with only the statuettes missing.17 The left-hand section of the west wall shows the Titian portrait of Nero above the favola of Nero playing while Rome burns18 and the small panels of Nero and Claudius, who is placed in the corner adjacent to the larger portrait of Claudius on the south wall with his favola of The Omen of Claudius’s imperial power below him. While Titian had probably relied upon antique medals and sculptures for his ‘likenesses’ of the emperors, the source for the various episodes in the favole below were all taken by Giulio from Suetonius’s famous Lives of the Caesars (‘The Twelve Caesars’) written in AD121. It is generally agreed by scholars that this iconographic programme was meant to provide symbolic parallels between Imperial Rome and the Gonzaga dynasty, a matter to which Duke Federico attached the greatest importance. In addition to this, the episodes chosen from Suetonius also served as moral exemplars of both the virtues and the vices of the Emperors, and as Koering has proposed, were intended to serve equally as admonitions and instructions of good government suitable for a prince.19 It has been suggested that they may have been chosen by the Cremonese humanist and poet Benedetto Lampridio (1478–1539), the tutor to the young Francesco Gonzaga, who had, according to a letter from Giulio himself of 1538, supplied him with the stories for the other rooms in the Appart.mes nto di Troia.20
On 26 March 1537 Federico Gonzaga wrote to Titian to say that he expected all other parts of the camerino’s decoration to be finished by the coming May. The haste necessitated by this demand may well explain the unusually modest quality of the preparation of Giulio’s surviving panels for this project, including those of the emperors, nearly all of which display knotted and poorly cut wood and bare priming. As was common practice in Giulio’s large and well-run workshop, which was based upon his long experience of that of Raphael in Rome, Giulio himself typically produced his designs in the form of detailed drawings, and then entrusted the execution of the paintings themselves to his assistants. However, in the case of the Cabinet of the Caesars, while drawings survive for some of the favole, none for the equestrian emperors have come down to us. As all scholars have concurred the varying overall standard of execution of the surviving camerino panels indicate that they were the work of several different hands in the workshop. Shearman, for example, regarded all five of the surviving panels preserved in the Royal collects ion as merely the work of Giulio’s workshop, and commented specifically upon ‘the very low standards of craftsmanship and materials’ accepted therein.21 However, the slightly higher quality and better preservation of the present Claudius has led some scholars, such as Stefania Lapenta and Renato Berzaghi, to see in it the only surviving panel from the group of emperors on horseback that could be connected to the hand of Giulio Romano himself. At the t.mes of the Mantua exhibition of 2002, the former scholar wrote that the panel’s ‘exceptional quality allows it to be given to Giulio Romano himself. It is likely indeed to have been one of Giulio Romano’s prototypes for his series of Roman Emperors’. Berzaghi included it in the later exhibition in Mantua in 2019 as by Giulio, or at the very least designed by him, with the execution by a member of the workshop, possibly Fermo Ghisoni (c. 1505–1575).
Federico Gonzaga had little t.mes to enjoy the cabinet of the Caesars, for he died on 28 August 1540, only a few months after his Titians were eventually delivered to Mantua. As is well documented, the contents of the camerino, including the Emperors on horseback, the favole, and Titian’s famous set of Portraits of the Caesars were later sold with the great Gonzaga collects ion to Charles I of England in 1627–28 (fig 7). The deal was brokered by the Flemish art dealer and merchant Daniel Nys (1572–1647) and Nicholas Lanier (1588–1666), a celebrated Huguenot musician and a connoisseur often used by the king as a purchasing agent for works of art. The Claudius and six others were hung with the Titians in the Gallery at St James’s Palace, and after the king’s execution in 1649, the set of eleven emperors were valued by the Trustees the following year for £100 (fig. 8). The group was subsequently purchased by Ralph Grynder for the same price in the sale in October 1651. Grynder, who was an upholsterer at the royal court in St James’s, was very active as a buyer during the dispersal of the Caroline collects ions, and the purchase of the Emperors on horseback was one of several lots that he undertook to purchase jointly with others in a group or ‘dividend’.22 The subsequent whereabouts of this panel is thereafter unknown, for the Emperors on horseback were last recorded together in his possession in London in 1652 and the group was subsequently broken up. Only two of the equestrian Emperors (Vitellius and Vespasian) and three of the favole were recovered at the Restoration and remain today in the Royal collects ion. It is not known to whom Grynder or his fellow buyers sold the other panels but at least three – those now in the Museum in Marseilles – were acquired by the great French collects or Everhard Jabach (1618–1695), who had been very active at the King’s sale on behalf of Cardinal Mazarin as well as on his own account. The three panels in Marseilles were later ceded by him (along with much of his famous collects ion) to Louis XIV of France in 1662.23
The next possible reference to the Claudius may well also be in France, where a painting by ‘Jules Romain’ of a mounted emperor is recorded by Louis-François Dubois de Saint Gelais (1669–1737) in his Description des tableaux du Palais Royal (1727), the famous collects ion inherited by Louis d’Orléans (1703–1752) from his father the Regent, Philippe II d’Orléans (1674–1723), as follows:
‘Un Empereur à Cheval. Peint sur bois, haute de deux pieds six pouces, large d’un pied huit pouces. Fig. de vingt pouces. Il est jeune, & a une tunique verte avec une chlamyde ou manteau Royal d’écarlate, & les jambes nues à l’antique. Il est monté sur un cheval blanc, richement équipé. Le fond du Tableau est un Paisage’ (‘An Emperor on horseback. Painted on panel, two pieds six pouces by one pied eight pouces. Fig[ure] of twenty pouces. He is young and wears a green tunic with a chlamys or cloak in royal scarlet, his legs bare after the fashion of the antique. He is mounted on a white horse, richly accoutred. The background of the paintings is a landscape’).
If the present panel is indeed the ‘Empereur à Cheval’ recorded by Dubois de Saint-Gelais, it formed part of large group of no less than sixteen pictures by Giulio in Philippe II d’Orléans’ collects ion.24 According to Casimir Stryienski’s exhaustive research into the Regent’s collects ion, the panel reappears in Louis’ own posthumous inventory of 1752 but not in that of his son Louis-Philippe d’Orléans (1725–1785) in 1785, and all trace of the picture is lost by 1788 if not before. Possibly this panel, or else another from the same series, a picture by ‘J. Romano: A Caesar Augustus on Horseback. A singular fine specimen formerly in King Charles’s collects ion’, from the collects ion or stock of the French aristocrat and picture dealer Alexis Delahante (1767–1837) was sold London, Phillips, 3 March 1810, lot 101.25 However, if this title is correct, this may possibly refer instead to Titian’s portrait of Augustus on the east wall of the Camerino, which is currently untraced.
The subsequent history of the ex-Orléans painting otherwise remains unknown. However, at the t.mes of the rediscovery of the Claudius in 1996, it was suggested that the panel had later formed part of the celebrated collects ion formed by Luigi Braschi-Onesti, Duke of Nemi (1745–1816), the nephew of Pope Pius VI, for his newly built Palazzo Braschi in Rome, but there does not seem to be any firm evidence for this. The collects ion was chiefly famed for its antiquities but also included a fine group of paintings, among them a Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist by Giulio. This, along with other works such as Van Dyck’s Portrait of Francisco de Moncada and Bernardo Strozzi’s Marriage at Cana as well as important antiquities were seized by the French following the occupation of the Palazzo Braschi by Napoleon’s troops between 1798–1802 and are today in the Louvre. Many other works were sold from the (still unfinished) palazzo after the prince’s death, and acquired by buyers such as Czar Nicholas I, but there is no record of the Claudius, nor does it appear in the sale of the forty-eight pictures from the Palazzo in Rome in 1843.
We are very grateful to Frances Coulter for her assistance with the cataloguing of this lot, and for her kind permission to reproduce her reconstruction of the west wall of the Cabinet of the Caesars.
1 ‘The Troy Apartments’, so named after the subject represented by the frescoes in the most important room, the Sala di Troia.
2 Claudius (10 BC–AD 54) was the grandson of Mark Anthony and the uncle of the emperor Caligula. Though much ridiculed by Suetonius for his physical deficiencies, his reign is generally considered a good one, distinguished above all by his invasion and occupation of Britain. He died as a result of poisoned mushrooms, reputedly supplied by his wife Messalina in order to ensure the succession of her son Nero.
3 Although Giorgio Vasari in his Vite records twelve emperors, the presence of a window in the centre of the east wall would have prevented a symMetricas l arrangement of three emperors on each wall. The possibility that the twelfth and last Emperor, Domitian, was deliberately excluded continues to be a subject of research.
4 The eleven originals formed part of the purchase of the Gonzaga collects ion by Charles I of England but were sold after his execution in October 1651 for £1200. They were later sold to Alonso de Cárdenas, Spanish Ambassador to London, and thence eventually to the Spanish crown. The set of twelve canvases (eleven by Titian) all perished in the fire in the Galeria del Melodia in the Alcázar in Madrid in 1734, as they were hung too high to be saved.
5 At least five sets of copies were commissioned from Campi, and extant sets by his hand remain, for example, in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and the Residenz in Munich (dated 1567–68). See, for example, H. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, London 1975, vol. III, Appendix, pp. 235–40, under no. L12.
6 These included the full twelve histories, but those of Vespasian and Titus were combined in one picture.
7 Inv. 423; panel 122 x 171 cm. A. Brejon de Lavergnée and D. Thiébaut, Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du Musée du Louvre, Paris 1981, p. 183, reproduced.
8 Inv. nos 402806, 406166 and 402576 respectively. See Whitaker and Clayton 2007, pp. 139–45, under no. 39, all reproduced in colour pp. 140–41, figs 39i–v.
9 In the 1627 Mantuan inventory, which was made at the t.mes of the sale of the Gonzaga collects ion to Charles I of England with the pictures still in situ, no. 13 records ‘Dieci altri quadri dipintovi un Imperator per quadro a cavallo’ (‘Ten other pictures each painted with an Emperor on horseback’). Only seven, however, are recorded in Abraham van der Doort’s Inventory of 1639. After the sale of the latter’s collects ion in 1651, ‘Eleven Caesars on horseback in long pieces of deal boards’ were recorded by Richard Symonds in London in 1652. Strada’s drawings show ten such pictures – including the Victory – and the missing two pictures were presumably on the wall (the North) for which no drawing survives.
10 See E. Verheyen, ‘Jacopo Strada’s Mantuan drawings of 1567–68’, Art Bulletin, XLIX, no. I, 1967, p. 64.
11 Inv. no. 31; panel, one 86.7 x 36.5 cm.; two 86.7 x 25 cm. Exhibited: Marseilles, Palais Longchamp, Peintures italiennes du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, October 1984 – February 1985, no. 73, reproduced.
12 J. Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the collects ion of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge and London 1983, pp. 123–24, nos 120 and 121, reproduced figs 107 and 109 (as workshop of Giulio Romano).
13 Panel, 86 x 55.5 cm. J. Byam Shaw, Paintings by Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford, Oxford 1967, p. 84, reproduced fig. 98 (as Giulio Romano, ‘very badly damaged and reveals little of the quality of the master’).
14 See, for example, E. Verheyen, ‘Correggio’s Amori di Giove’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIX, 1966, pp. 169–72. The drawing for the complete north wall is missing. However, a drawing by Andreasi of a painting on the north wall, with the subject of The Triumph of Vespasian and Titus, also preserved in Düsseldorf, correctly records the appearance of the original history by Giulio Romano today preserved in the Louvre in Paris.
15 This orientation of the room was proposed by Koering (2012), Berzaghi (2016) and most recently by Coulter (2019). In many reconstructions of the Camerino this wall has been regarded as the south wall, for example Shearman (1983), Whitaker and Clayton (2007).
16 The precision of such details would suggest a very considered iconographical programme. However, Shearman (1983) felt that the relative modesty of the riders’ armour indicated that they should be seen merely as soldiers rather than emperors.
17 Of the eight statuettes drawn by Andreasi, only one, now in the Kunstkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (inv. 6023), can be located. The precise subject of the statuette, a naked striding youth, is unclear. Andreasi’s drawings recording all the statuettes are also preserved in the Kupferstichkabinett in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf.
18 The depraved Nero (AD 37–69) set fire to large parts of Rome in fulfilment of a prophecy. According to Suetonius (VI, 38), he watched the conflagration for six days and seven nights from the Septizonium (in the sixteenth century the Tower of Maecenas) and was so moved that he sang the entire Iliad. In the background of the scene can be seen the Colosseum, Arch of Constantine and the Pantheon.
19 For a fuller exposition see Koering 2012, particularly pp. 19–22.
20 See, for example, Whitaker and Clayton, 2007, pp. 141, 145 n. 4.
21 J. Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the collects ion of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge 1983, pp. 121–26, the panels all reproduced figs 105–9.
22 An Inventory of the King’s Goods and Furniture sold by the Rebels 1649, handwritten ms. copy of the original 1649 Appraisal, English early 18th century, p. 157, no. 220: ‘The 11 Emperours done by Julio – [£]100 – Sold Mr. Grinder & others in a Dividend ye23d.Oct.o 1651 as Aprised’. Sold London, Christie’s, 23 November 1994, lot 20.
23 The three panels were united in a single frame in 1685, and much later given to Marseilles in 1802. A further 101 pictures were ceded to the King in 1671.
24 See Schmid and Armstrong-Totten 2018 pp. 231–32, nos 276–91. Some of these were among the 259 paintings from the collects ion of Queen Christina of Sweden purchased by the Regent in January 1721. The Claudius does not, however, seem to appear in any of the inventories of her collects ion. The majority of these paintings by Giulio later formed part of the great Bryan Orléans sales of 26 December 1798 and 14 February 1800.
25 The 105 pictures were described as ‘recently consigned from Holland’. Delahante was a significant figure in the transmission of fine paintings from French pre-revolutionary sources, as well as Germany and the Netherlands, to wealthy English collects
ors in London, among them the Prince Regent and the future George IV.