Busts of the Roman Emperors - Southampton Arts Center
January 3, 2022
They are wearing Santa hats, but they still add gravitas to the sculpture garden outside the Southampton Arts Center when I visit them on New Year’s Eve. By my count, eleven of twelve Caesars are present, one in particular more than once, and there are a few hangers-on as well, set off from the pack by their beards that Romans began to wear close to the Fall.
I don’t know much about how these reproductions got to the East End of Long Island, New York. I only know that they were a passion of Samuel Parrish, a Philadelphia Quaker and art collector who founded the Arts Center as the Art Museum in Southampton in 1898, which was later expanded to the Parrish Art Museum in nearby Water Mill. Parrish needed a home for his growing collection of busts, snatched up in the course of Italian travels, and so bought a piece of land from the town’s next-door Rogers Memorial Library to set them up, in two rows, facing each other down like dance partners at a ball, coyly looking in all directions. Calling the dance down at one end is a full-length statue of Julius Caesar in battle gear.
It was a timely sighting, since I am in the middle of reading classicist Mary Beard’s new book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient to the Modern. Why are these statues here? What impression are they supposed to make on the passers-by on Jobs Lane, on the prowl for sundresses at off-season prices and Aperol Spritz (Guilty)? The power of these titans is subdued here, as the viewer passes them as if reviewing a line of enlisted soldiers. On their plinths they are at shorter stature than full-grown men, so we can look right into their eyes.
What really gets me, though, is that the Caesars are placed out of chronological order. It is difficult to read the names on the weather-beaten pedestals, but going in a clockwise circle from the entrance, they go (I think) as follows: Julius Caesar, Otho, Galba, Nero, Claudius, Caligula, Tiberius, Julius Caesar (again), Vitellius, Vespasian, Commodus, Antoninus Pius, Hadrian, Trajan, Nerva, Domitian, Titus, and the last one, I just don’t know; I can’t read the name. There there are a few missing: Augustus (he must have been too hard to find), Marcus Aurelius (same, very hip now), Lucius Verus, and everyone after Commodus. As if if didn’t matter who they were, or the collective story they tell.
At first, I did not think these Caesars were placed here to demonstrate their dominance; I thought they were public art, and meant more for us to recall sunny Italian holidays, eating gelato outside the Uffizi, than the menacing thrum of hooves at city gates. But then seeing them there, set up willy-nilly, I realized these Caesars are here for us, yes, and also to demonstrate the dominance of men like Parrish and his ilk. In this beach town thick with ultra-wealthy New Yorkers, like a modern Cumae, this public art serves as a reminder that the rich, ultimately, have power over us all. They can possess art; they can buy it off the plinths where they found it and ship it to their own little empires. Doing so, they can put themselves on the same level as those lions of the past. And Caligula.
Still, I like to visit the Emperors. As was probably intended, I do feel, among the brick and iron and creeping vines, transported to Italy, to a gray day I once spent walking the Palatine Hill in Rome. And the Santa hats are like little Christian cherries on pagan sundaes. A little memento mori - that the end comes to us all.