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this started as a half-baked shitpost at midnight but took on a life of its own, and the wonderful @winterstarfall bullied me into posting it, so.
AEGON THE CONQUEROR and TRAJAN OPTIMUS
first of his name and of his dynasty/the man whose name was invoked as a blessing
considered the gold standard of their nation's leadership, both were considered foreigners despite being raised in the land they would come to conquer thanks to their parentage (of valyrian and hispanic descent respectively), and they expanded their empire's borders with almost shocking ease. pragmatic and less prone to egomania than the average member of their profession. overseeing a long period of peace and prosperity to accompany their asskicking, they also both happened to die of a stroke.
AENYS THE FIRST and ALEXANDER SEVERUS
the abomination king/the last of the severans
rulers who were better suited for more peaceful times, ultimately both wound up being seen as weak-willed due to showing reluctance in battle. they wound up defined more by their mothers than their fathers (aenys taking after his in personality and alexander having his mother do most of the ruling) resulting in assassination (probably in one case, definitely in the other).
MAEGOR THE CRUEL and COMMODUS
he who tried to drown the land in its own blood/the slayer of the golden age
the son of a highly competent father, neither of these men thought it beneath them to do their own dirty work committing mass slaughter and ruining a perfectly functional nation. they also made sure to have a lot of sex and torture plenty of people along the way before their premature, if not predictable, violent deaths, leaving everyone else with a massive mess to clean up.
JAEHAERYS THE CONCILIATOR and AUGUSTUS CAESAR
the architect of the golden age/the gravedigger of the republic
the other gold standard of leadership for their nations! both wound up involved in a massively bloody civil war as a teenager and came out victorious despite being more of an intellectual figure than a straightforward warrior. despite this, they were able to use their great political savvy to usher in an era of peace and prosperity, eschewing the ornate imagery of their predecessors in favor of a more humble, but effective propagandistic image. yet for all their accomplishments, they couldn't stop their preferred heirs from dying off before them unexpectedly. on top of that, they got pissed at their daughter for having sex and wound up kicking her off the continent, then grew depressed at the death of most of their loved ones before dying of old age.
VISERYS THE FIRST and CONSTANTIUS CHLORUS
the young king/the midwife of christianity
two men who you'd struggle to call bad leaders. their administration was competent in the face of adversity, if not genius, and in some ways they could even be considered to have progressive values. the successor they wound up choosing and the civil war that followed wound up overshadowing everything else they ever did, however, and so they are often left as a side character in another's story rather than a protagonist in their own right.
AEGON THE USURPER and VITELLIUS
the man who lost everything for the throne/third of the year of four emperors
rulers whose reigns existed entirely within a civil war, they still managed to stand out on account of their pointless violence even for an extremely violent era. too cunning to be content, too cruel to loved, and too incompetent to be respected, ultimately their own followers became their downfall.
AEGON THE BROKEN KING and VALENTINIAN THE SECOND
dragonsbane/the caged bird
¿what other word can you use for them besides puppet? maybe sorrowful. elevated at a young age and talked over by their advisors, they lived isolated lives and died lonely deaths (possibly the result of what little agency they were granted in their lives). their lives can also be seen as the end of an era of greatness that had once defined their nation (the death of the dragons and the rise of the puppet emperors).
DAERON THE YOUNG DRAGON and JULIAN THE APOSTATE
would-be great conqueror/would-be great reformer
after unexpectedly proving their competence in battle, these men's promising starts to their reigns were cut off by a surprise attack. one of the great what-ifs of history, the legacy that they wound up stuck with was "won some fights before starting a pointless war then left us up shit's creek with no paddle".
BAELOR THE MOST BELOVED and THEODOSIUS THE GREAT
the blessed king/the last ruler of a united empire
two monarchs with a surprisingly high-quality reputation despite all the cruelty and religious zealotry they wound up participating in. their impulses overrode commitment to their duties and common sense at key moments, leaving their nations worse for the wear, yet they remain beloved.
VISERYS THE SECOND and CLAUDIUS THE FIRST
the hand of the king who bore the weight of the crown/the conqueror elevated from behind a curtain
both men who were never particularly well-liked, they found success after being elevated at a surprisingly old age after a life of surviving their predecessor's bizarre excesses. they were both scholarly and very likely disabled (viserys with a spine condition and claudius with something like cerebral palsy).
AEGON THE UNWORTHY and HONORIUS
a vacuum of excess/the emperor more interested in chickens than the sack of his city
two pathetic excuses for a head of state, offering less help than a screaming toddler in a dirty diaper during an era when the people really needed not that. the only thing worse than their constant lack of action was the astoundingly terrible decisions that they did manage to make. two morons so useless that nobody even bothered to assassinate them.
DAERON THE FALSEBORN and HADRIAN
the good bastard/the bloodthirsty peacemaker
a pair of rulers who were unconventional for their era, disappointing many of their peers by sorting out several crises peacefully and introducing much-needed reforms to the state that undoubtedly preserved it. this didn't stop them from coming down hard on rebels, with their foreign policy defining conflict for centuries to come. although their rise to power was of dubious legitimacy, both are generally considered quite good at their jobs, even if many of their peers hated their obsession with a foreign culture (dorn and greece). they also both died of illness.
AERYS THE FIRST and HOSTILIAN
two idiots who accomplished basically nothing and then died.
MAEKAR and DOMITIAN
the anvil of summerhall/the damnatio memoria'd
the unfavorite sons who were never expected to take on the throne, they still rose to the occasion and proved themselves to be competent, even if they were never good at gaining the respect of others or predicting other people's moves. military men at heart, they were passed up for a promotion often enough that the fact that they didn't do as much murder as expected is surprising.
AERYS THE MAD KING and CALIGULA
he who would burn his own kingdom to ash/the conqueror of neptune
when they ascended to the throne, everyone was fairly optimistic about their prospects. any hope they had evaporated after a close encounter with death escalated these men from "impractical" to "batshit murder-happy clowns", resulting in a reign of terror that ended in their assassination. also they had surprisingly goofy nicknames (scab and baby boots).
Year of the Four Emperors: When Four Men Battled For Control of the Roman Empire
January 69 CE. The tyrannical Emperor Nero is dead, having killed himself after being declared a public enemy by the Senate. In his place, the aged and unpopular Galba sits on the throne - but, with no blood ties to the now extinct House of Caesar, Galba's rule is precarious indeed. He is beset by pretenders on all sides. In Germany, the legions proclaim their own general, Vitellius, as emperor. In Judea, the general Vespasian watches events play out, waiting for an opportunity to make his move. And, in Rome, Galba's former right-hand man Otho looks for his chance to usurp the throne. These four men will soon battle for control of the Roman Empire in the first civil war since the dying days of the republic. Only one will come out on top - but who?
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⇒ Year of the Four Emperors: When Four Men Battled For Control of the Roman Empire
sad sporus fact #82: his sentence didn’t come immediately. sporus’s execution order was set while vespasian invaded rome in july but vitellius came to power in mid april. sporus was likely imprisoned, exiled, or worse, from at least may to july. but it could have lasted until december.
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On 24 September 15 AD, Aulus Vitellius, one of the emperors from 69 AD (the year of 4 Emperors) was born. Here are some facts about Vitellius:
When his parents saw his horoscope, they were so horrified they tried to keep him from governing a province or commanding an army.
In his youth, he was a guest of Emperor Tiberius on Capri and the most malicious rumors say that he was one of the emperor's tiddlers - boys trained to sexually please him - which in turn won political advancement to Aulus's father Lucius.
Galba named Vitellius commander of the Rhine legions because he believed he was too lazy and incompetent to lead a rebellion and declare himself emperor.
He was the only one who didn't take the name Caesar as part of his regnal name, choosing Germanicus instead.
He allegedly feasted four times a day. Extravagant dishes like pheasant brains and flamingo tongues were served at these feasts.
When his army was defeated by Vespasian's legions, he tried to abdicate but his supporters wouldn't let him.
After his final defeat, he tried to hide but was dragged by an angry jeering mob to Gemonian stairs and savagely killed. His head was then paraded through the streets of Rome and his body was thrown into the Tiber.
Tintoretto’s daughter was an acclaimed artist in her own right but there is frustratingly little to go on, writes Rebecca Ann Hughes, when i
A black-and-white chalk drawing of the head of a portly man was recently sold at a Christie’s auction as the only work firmly attributed to Marietta Robusti, daughter of the Venetian master Jacopo Robusti, perhaps better known as Tintoretto. Reports from her contemporary biographers suggest that Marietta, who worked in her father’s workshop in the late 16th century, was an accomplished and sought-after artist in her own right. But in the centuries that followed she fell into obscurity. Now, amid a growing movement to reclaim the women artists so often neglected by history, Marietta has the potential to join 16th-century peers such as Lavinia Fontana and Sofonisba Anguissola in the history books – if only researchers could find some more of her work.
‘Marietta had a brilliant mind like her father. She painted such works that men were astonished by her talent,’ writes Carlo Ridolfi, author of a biography of Jacopo Tintoretto and two of his children, Domenico and Marietta, first published in 1642. Nicknamed ‘La Tintoretta’, Marietta – who, according to Ridolfi, dressed as a boy in order to assist her father on his projects – is recorded as having painted many portraits and produced works of her own invenzione. Another of Tintoretto’s early biographers, Raffaello Borghini, reports how Marietta was requested as a court artist by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and King Philip II of Spain – although ‘Greatly loving his daughter, [Tintoretto] did not want her taken from his sight,’ writes Borghini.
With such glowing accounts of Marietta’s artistic prowess, attempts to rediscover her work have been numerous and in some cases quite inventive. Unfortunately, these endeavours have rarely been successful.
One of the most commonly attributed paintings is a Self-Portrait with Madrigal located in the Uffizi’s Corridoio Vasariano in Florence. The painting shows a young woman in a white dress with her right arm resting on a harpsichord behind her and a music score in the other hand. The Uffizi labels the work as by Marietta Robusti in its online catalogue. However, art historians have questioned the credibility of this attribution based on provenance records, which show that the portrait was attributed to Titian by a Venetian collector in the 17th century.
Most damning of all, though, is the mediocrity of the painting. The art historian Joanna Woods-Marsden comments in her book Renaissance Self-Portraiture (1998) that the rudimentary foreshortening and poor anatomy are hard to reconcile with the praise lauded on Marietta by her biographers. Duncan Bull, writing in the Burlington Magazine in 2009, dismisses it as ‘a feeble work that speaks more of Verona than of Venice, let alone of Tintoretto’s workshop’. The lack of naturalism and the stiffness of the sitter are worlds away from the fluid, energetic style characteristic of a pupil of the Venetian master.
‘Marietta’s special gift,’ according to Ridolfi, ‘was knowing how to paint portraits well.’ This was not unusual praise for 16th-century women artists, who were highly valued as portraitists. Women were considered to have an eye for detail, particularly jewellery and decoration on clothing, which was so crucial in portraiture for demonstrating a sitter’s wealth and status.
Several portraits have been tentatively attributed to Marietta Robusti. These include a Portrait of an Old Man and a Boy in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Rijksmuseum’s Portrait of Ottavio Strada. The attribution of the former painting rested on the signature ‘M R’ on the bottom left of the canvas; after cleaning, it appears that the signature actually reads ‘M 3’. The painting in Amsterdam, currently catalogued as by Jacopo Tintoretto, has received attention because Marietta’s early biographers mention a portrait she painted of the courtier Jacopo Strada. Some art historians argue that the biographers mistakenly cited Jacopo instead of his son Ottavio Strada – and that the Rijksmuseum’s painting is the portrait in question. But this is just one theory.
Plenty of historic catalogue entries attribute other work to Marietta, but evidence of these paintings is now thin on the ground. It is likely that Marietta also helped her father with public commissions, such as paintings in their local church in Venice, the Madonna dell’Orto. But her contributions in this respect are hard to pinpoint.
Just one drawing, therefore, is categorically attributed to Marietta. Head of man, after the antique, which sold at Christie’s in Paris last month for €100,000, depicts the Roman emperor Vitellius drawn from an ancient bust – a copy of which Tintoretto kept in his workshop. Scrawled across the drawing are the words ‘this head is by the hand of madonna Marietta’, probably added by her father to distinguish the drawing from the countless others that would have lain about the workshop.
This drawing is a much-needed example of Marietta’s talents. As Stijn Alsteens, international head of Christie’s Old Master drawings department explains to me via email, ‘Marietta in her time was admired as a portraitist, and the drawing can be said to reflect her interest in physiognomy.’ The drawing, Alsteens says, confirms Ridolfi’s account that Marietta was a gifted member of her father’s studio, on an equal footing with her male counterparts.
In the drawing, Marietta captures the head in soft, swift strokes, economic shading and dashes of highlights. We see the fluidity and movement expected of an artist trained by Tintoretto. On the recto of the sheet is another drawing from Tintoretto’s workshop of unknown attribution portraying the face of Giuliano de’ Medici. ‘Where the recto is mostly a study of light and shadow, the verso focuses on the distinctive features of Vitellius’s face – true to Marietta’s gifts as a portraitist,’ Hélène Rihal, head of Christie’s Old Master drawings department in Paris, said in advance of the sale.
Although the attribution is accepted, it is only one drawing and that poses a dilemma for anyone seeking to restore Marietta’s reputation. The historical evidence has the potential to put Marietta on a par with contemporaries like Fontana or Anguissola. The gaping hole is the physical evidence. For the moment La Tintoretta, the legendary woman artist, remains just that – a legend.
