The Albertina bronze is one of the most precious portraits of antiquity,
not merely because it confirms the testimony of the green basalt bust in
the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even more emphatic and
impressive illustration to the narrative of Suetonius.
Caligula is here represented as young and singularly beautiful. It is
indeed an ideal Roman head, with the powerful square modelling, the
crisp short hair, low forehead, and regular firm features proper to the
noblest Roman type. The head is thrown backward from the throat; and
there is a something of menace or defiance or suffering in the
suggestion of brusque movement given to the sinews of the neck. This
attitude, together with the tension of the forehead and the fixed
expression of pain and strain communicated by the lines of the
mouth--strong muscles of the upper lip and abruptly chiselled under
lip--in relation to the small eyes, deep set beneath their cavernous and
level brows, renders the whole face a monument of spiritual anguish. I
remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has the same anxious
forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; but the agony of this
fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouth of Pandolfo
Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the verge of breaking into the
spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze. It is
just this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of
Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing wholly
vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of
Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus are all absent here.
This face idealizes the torture of a morbid soul. It is withal so truly
beautiful that it might easily be made the poem of high suffering or
noble passion. If the bronze were plastic I see how a great sculptor by
but few strokes could convert it into an agonizing Stephen or Sebastian.
As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made
Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was the
torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of
empire tantalized him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his
soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of empty pleasure
and unsatisfying cruelty, forever hungry; until the malady of his
spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right medium for
its development, became unique--the tragic type of pathological desire.
What more than all things must have plagued a man with that face was
probably the unavoidable meanness of his career. When we study the
chapters of Suetonius we are forced to feel that, though the situation
and the madness of Caligula were dramatically impressive, his crimes
were trivial and small. In spite of the vast scale on which he worked
his devilish will, his life presents a total picture of sordid vice,
differing only from pothouse dissipation and school-boy cruelty in point
of size. And this of a truth is the Nemesis of evil. After a time, mere
tyrannous caprice must become commonplace and cloying, tedious to the
tyrant and uninteresting to the student of humanity; nor can I believe
that Caligula failed to perceive this to his own infinite disgust.
Suetonius asserts that he was hideously ugly. How are we to square this
testimony with the witness of the bronze before us? What changed the
face, so beautiful and terrible in youth, to ugliness that shrank from
sight in manhood? Did the murderers find it blurred in its fine
lineaments, furrowed with lines of care, hollowed with the soul's
hunger? Unless a life of vice and madness had succeeded in making
Caligula's face what the faces of some maniacs are--the bloated ruin of
what was once a living witness to the soul within--I could fancy that
death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than this bust of the
self-tormented young man shows. Have we not all seen the anguish of
thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the hands of the Deliverer?