Sculpted in the round.

The marble shows signs of sugaring. Under the nose a broken off fragment has been restored.

…; ? collection prince Willem V (1748-1806), Kabinet van Antiquiteiten, Stadhouderlijk Kabinet, The Hague, 1759;¹¹S.W.A. Drossaers and T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer (eds.), Inventarissen van de inboedels in de verblijven van de Oranjes en daarmee gelijk te stellen stukken 1567-1795, The Hague, vol. 2, 1975, p. 745, no. 56: 116 antique marmere en andere beelden, borststukken, bas-reliëfs, inschripties enz.. transferred to the Nationale Konst-Gallery in Huis ten Bosch, The Hague, 1800;²²Mentioned in the 1801 inventory by C.S. Roos, see E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum: Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1909, p. 52, nos. 214, 215: Twee in marmer uitgehouwene Romeinsche keizers Galba en Hadrianus and P.J.J. van Thiel, ‘De inrichting van de Nationale Konst-Gallery in het openingsjaar 1800’, Oud Holland 95 (1981), pp. 170-227, esp. nos. 205 and 208. transferred to the Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, The Hague, date unknown; transferred to the museum, 1889

Object number: BK-NM-8923

From the seventeenth century onwards it became more prevalent in the Netherlands to consider gardens as ‘outdoor rooms’, following the 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.³³E. de Jong and C. Schellekens, Het beeld buiten: Vier eeuwen tuinsculptuur in Nederland, exh. cat. Heino/Wijhe (Kasteel ’t Nijenhuis) 1994, p. 61. 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.⁴⁴For 16th-century series of Roman emperors, see B. von Hagen, Römische Kaiserbüsten als Dekorationsmotiv im 16. Jahrhundert, Augsburg 1987 (diss., Julius-Maximilians-Universität zu Würzburg.

These two more than life-size marble busts were made for that purpose. It is not entirely clear which emperors they portray. The man with curled hair and a beard (BK-NM-8924) could be either Commodus or Hadrian. The beardless emperor (shown here) could be Julius Caesar or Galba. The beardless emperor could be Julius Caesar or Galba. It is not known from which garden the busts originated or if there were more emperors in the series. A print made by Jan van den Avelen in 1691 shortly after the country estate Zorgvliet (The Hague) was completed, gives a general impression of the way such busts were used in the garden’s statuary scheme (fig. a). Another example is the print of the ensemble of busts of emperors in the Orangerie at Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s pleasure garden in Cleves (RP-P-1905-5264).⁵⁵G. de Werd (ed.), Soweit der Erdkreis reicht: Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen, 1604-1679, exh. cat. Cleves (Städtisches Museum Haus Koekkoek) 1979, esp. pp. 224-27.

It is often difficult to recognize the style of a particular sculptor with such emperors’ busts, because in this genre the sculptural tradition was strongly determined by likenesses from Antiquity and portraits on Roman coins. The present busts are in keeping with that tradition, but have idealized, almost expressionless faces, as also found in the work of eighteenth-century Dutch sculptors like Ignatius van Logteren (1685-1732) and Michiel Emanuel van Shee (d. 1739/40).⁶⁶Compare, for example, the bust of the beardless emperor with the Apollo bust by Ignatius van Logteren, see P.M. Fischer, Ignatius en Jan van Logteren: Beeldhouwers en stuckunstenaars in het Amsterdam van de 18e eeuw, Alphen aan de Rijn 2005, fig. 119. In that sense they differ from the more expressive, baroque series made in 1674 by Bartholomeus Eggers (c. 1637-1692) in Amsterdam for the elector Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg and of which the Rijksmuseum owns four lead casts (cf. BK-B-68-A).⁷⁷For this series, see, among others, W. Halsema-Kubes, ‘Bartholomeus Eggers’ keizers- en keizerinnenbusten voor keurvorst Friedrich Wilhelm van Brandenburg’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 36 (1988), pp. 44-53.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 359; P.J.J. van Thiel, ‘De inrichting van de Nationale Konst-Gallery in het openingsjaar 1800’, Oud Holland 95 (1981), pp. 170-227, esp. nos. 205, 208

B. van der Mark, 2025, 'anonymous, Bust of Emperor Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) or Galba (3-69), Amsterdam, c. 1700 - c. 1750', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200116051