Bust of Emperor Julius Caesar (100-44 BC)

Entry

From the seventeenth century onwards it became prevalent in the Netherlands to consider gardens as ‘outdoor rooms’, following the Italian and French tradition. The ground plan was cleanly and architecturally designed, and statuary was erected in prominent places. A series of busts of ancient scholars or Roman emperors would often be included enabling the owner to show off his good taste and knowledge of antiquity.¹ That idea came from the Italian studiolo, a room dedicated to art and study where series of sculptures of such viri illustri (illustrious gentlemen) were arranged.²

These more than life-like lead busts are exact replicas of four marble busts from a series featuring the first twelve Roman emperors and their consorts in the gardens of Charlottenburg Palace (Berlin).³ The Berlin ensemble is very likely to have come from Oranienburg Palace (near Berlin), for which the Amsterdam sculptor Bartholomeus Eggers (c. 1637-1692) made a series of 12 Keijsers van goeden marmor (12 Emperors in good marble), commissioned by the elector Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg, starting in 1674, and from 1682 onwards made a series of ‘twelve Empresses’.⁴ On the basis of the names on the pedestals of the marble series in Berlin, the Amsterdam emperors can easily be identified as Julius Caesar (shown here), Caligula (BK-B-68-A), Otho (BK-B-68-C) and Domitian (BK-B-68-D).

The portraits are in keeping with a popular sculptural tradition dating back to ancient likenesses of emperors and portraits on Roman coins. The baroque armour is the only exception. Bartholomeus Eggers based them in part on prints by Aegidius Sadeler II (c. 1570-1629), who in turn made them after the very famous series of works (now lost) of the first twelve Roman emperors painted by Titian for the palace of Federico Gonzaga in Mantua. Eggers’ derivations from Sadeler are the most marked with emperors Caligula (RP-P-OB-5059) and Otho (RP-P-OB-5063).⁵

It is highly likely that the lead figures were cast using the models (in plaster or terracotta) that Eggers would have made when carving the marble busts in Berlin. Various sources confirm that the sculptor often kept the models of his works. For example, the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin (1654-1728) describes a visit to Eggers’ workshop in 1687 where, among other things, he saw three marble statues of electors and the models of eight portraits which had already been delivered to the principal, once more elector Friedrich Wilhelm.⁶ In addition, the inventory drawn up in 1681 of Eggers’ insolvent estate, described many models.⁷ The 13 Roomse Keysers van plyster (13 Roman Emperors in plaster), which were in Eggers’ drawing room at the time, i.e. the best room in his house, could probably not be identified as the models of the life-size busts in Berlin.⁸ These would have been for a different, smaller series. Perhaps they were the models of the ensemble that stood in the Orangerie at Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s pleasure garden in Cleves which is associated with Eggers (RP-P-1905-5264).⁹

It is possible that Eggers himself had arranged the models of the Berlin series to be cast in lead, but equally, they may have been done without his knowledge by a caster who had obtained the models. For example, they could have been purchased in 1681 at Eggers’ bankruptcy sale or after his death from his estate. The Amsterdam caster Bernardus (‘Barent’) Dronrijp (c. 1660-after 1705) is a good candidate for the work. Tessin praised Dronrijp in his 1687 travel journal as ‘the best and almost only iron-caster of statues in Amsterdam’.¹⁰ It is not known if there were other portraits from the same series of emperors apart from the four belonging to the Rijksmuseum. The print of the afore-mentioned Orangerie in Cleves and one of the Groot Prieel (large garden pavilion) at Zorgvliet park in The Hague (fig. a) give a good idea of the ways in which the busts of emperors were used to enhance a formal garden in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.¹¹

Until 1892 the four lead busts stood in the garden of Meer-en-Berg (also known as Meerenberg) estate in Heemstede, a country residence that belonged to a succession of Amsterdam families from 1655 onwards: the Trips, the De Neufvilles and Van Lenneps.¹² We do not know at what point and by which family the emperors’ busts were acquired for the estate in question, or if at the time it was a complete series of twelve or merely comprised the present four. Admittedly, thanks to the contract covering the sale of the estate to David de Neufville in 1696, ‘lead statues’ were known to have belonged at the estate when the Trip family owned it,¹³ but in the absence of any further description it is unsure whether those were the busts in question. It is equally possible that they wound up at Meer-en-Berg at a later stage, for instance when the formal gardens were being laid out for Dirk van Lennep after a design by the famous architect Daniel Marot (1661-1752), begun in 1730, or (less logically) when they were redesigned in English landscape style by Jan David Zocher senior (1763-1817) in 1794.¹⁴

Bieke van der Mark, 2025