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 idealises
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 agonising 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 tantalised 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, for ever 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 pot-house dissipation and
schoolboy 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?