Caesar in Rome

Triumphs of Caesar: VII the Corselet Bearers  Andrea Mantegna, 1485-95

© Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace

My first encounter with  Mantegna's work was an engraving from his Triumphs of Caesar series, reproduced on the cover of an Italian exercise book in a department store in Rome in 1960.   In provincial England much of life was still utilitarian: everyday stationery and exercise books were undecorated, and notebooks had plain paper or card covers.   I was also amazed to buy my postage stamps over a formica counter printed with Italian Renaissance drawings,  and brought back these lovely laminated  notebooks with their art pictorial covers as souvenirs.   This one shows Trajan's column in Rome in the background, with its equestrian statue of Trajan on top, not as either Julius Caesar or Mantegna would have seen it, but as it would have appeared after Trajan's death in AD 117. Mantegna would have been recreating this view from historic accounts and surviving antique sculptures, for Trajan's statue disappeared before he was born. (It was replaced by a statue of St. Peter in 1587.)

These world famous paintings were bought by Charles I for the Royal Collection, along with other great Italian Renaissance works of art, in 1629, and their home has been at Hampton Court Palace since.  They are displayed separately from the other art treasures in the Palace, in triumphal sequence in the Orangery, and should not be missed.

John Aubrey remembers

"When I was a a boy 9 years old, I was with my father at one Mr Singleton's, an alderman and woollen-draper in Gloucester, who had in his parlour, over the chimney, the whole description of the funeral, engraved and printed on papers pasted together,* which, at length, was, I believe, the length of the room at least; but he had contrived it to be turned upon two pins, that turning one of them made the figures march all in order.  It did make such a strong impression on my young fantasy, that I remember it as if it were but yesterday.  I could never see it elsewhere.  The house is in the great long street, over against the high steeple; and 'tis likely it remains there still. 'Tis pity it is not redone."

*Published by Thomas Laut, 1587

Brief Lives  "Sir Philip Sidney"  John Aubrey,   ed. R. Barber