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The wrong Caesars
As a dozen Renaissance gilded silver treasures, the Aldobrandini Tazze or Twelve Caesars, go on show at Waddesdon Manor, Professor Mary Beard unscrews the puzzle of how the Roman emperors and dishes got mixed up
It was in the autumn of 2010 that I first came face-to-face with one of the so-called Aldobrandini Tazze. I was a few months into a new research project on images of the Twelve Caesars in Renaissance and later art, and I already had a sense of the importance of this extraordinary set of 16th-century silverware.
The Domitian dish or tazza, circa 1587–99, gilded silver. by an anonymous (Netherlandish?) goldsmith. D. 37.6m. Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Here was a Renaissance re-creation of those first 12 Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) to Domitian (AD 51–96), a portrait gallery of dynasts in miniature, their names clearly inscribed at their feet. But even more interest
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