Julius Caesar (from the Heroes Tapestries)

A wool tapestry of about 1400-1410 showing Julius Caesar enthroned under a Gothic architectural canopy, crowned, armed with a falchion, and flanked by musicians and soldiers whose shields carry the double-headed eagle of the Roman empire. It is one of only five surviving figures from a set of Nine Heroes tapestries commissioned for an unidentified patron around 1400, a set scholars have proposed, without proof, belonged to Jean, duke of Berry.

The panel's own history is a reconstruction as much as its subject's empire was. At some undocumented point the set was cut into pieces; by the early twentieth century the fragments had been resewn as curtains in a French household. The Metropolitan Museum acquired the surviving material in two campaigns fifteen years apart, a 1932 purchase and a 1947 gift, and four tapestry restorers spent nearly 6,700 hours piecing ninety-four fragments back into the hangings now on view. The Julius Caesar panel came entirely from the 1947 gift.

The panel is currently off view again, mid-treatment in the Museum's own Department of Textile Conservation as part of a long-term study begun in 2018. Analysis of its dyes published in 2024 identified a lichen source never before confirmed in a historic textile, the first evidence that lichen dyes prepared by boiling water, rather than fermentation, were in use before the eighteenth century.

What the panel shows

Julius Caesar sits enthroned at the center of an elaborate Gothic architectural setting built from tracery windows, pointed arches, and small spired canopies, the standard framing device used for each of the Nine Heroes. He wears the imperial crown and holds a falchion, a single-edged curved saber associated in medieval art with authority and command. A shield bearing a double-headed eagle, the emblem the period attached to the ancient Roman empire, hangs from a spear at his side. Musicians and foot soldiers surround him, their blue clothing and accessories echoing his own regal coloring, a visual device that ties the attendant figures to the hero they serve.

The whole hanging measures 165 1/2 by 93 11/16 inches, woven entirely in wool, warp and weft alike. It is one of only five figures to survive from what was originally a set of nine, each a large-scale wall hanging meant to be seen from across a hall rather than examined at close range, though the surviving detail rewards close looking: fine outlines and shading were worked in a black compound-like technique typical of the period's best tapestry weaving.

The Nine Heroes and what they were for

The idea of Nine Heroes, or Nine Worthies, drawing three exemplars each from Classical antiquity, the Hebrew Bible, and Christian history, was first put into words in a French poem around 1312 and became one of the most widely repeated moral schemes in late medieval European art and literature. Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar stood for the Classical era; Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus for the Jewish tradition; King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon for Christian Europe. Together the nine were held up as models of chivalry, meant to give the noble and upper classes of the period both worthy warriors to admire and just leaders to imitate.

Woven at full scale in wool, hangings like this one served a double purpose: they were images to be read and admired, and they were also functional textiles that kept the stone interiors of a great hall or chamber warmer and more festive during the colder months. The choice to depict Caesar in particular, crowned and armed with the double-headed eagle of imperial Rome, placed the weight of ancient legitimate authority behind whatever hall the tapestry originally hung in.

Who commissioned it, and the case that does not quite close

No inscription on the Julius Caesar panel itself names a patron. The strongest documented lead comes from a different panel in the same set: the Joshua and David hanging carries fourteen heraldic banners across its upper register, and ten of them display the coat of arms of Jean, duke of Berry, son of King John II of France, with the remaining four split between the royal arms of France and those of his brother, Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. On that evidence, scholars have proposed since the tapestries entered the Museum's collection that the whole set was made for the duke of Berry.

The proposal runs into a real obstacle. Surviving inventories of the duke of Berry's own collection do record that he owned tapestries depicting the Nine Heroes, but describe them as woven with gold and silver thread. The Cloisters set is wool throughout, with no metal thread. The Metropolitan's own position, stated on its object pages, is that the resemblance is tantalizing but that there is no conclusive proof regarding the tapestries' original ownership. This record follows that caution: the patron is unknown, not merely undocumented in this record's own sources.

Where it was woven, and by whom

The Metropolitan currently catalogues the tapestry's culture as South Netherlandish. The Museum's own 2024 technical study of this specific panel, conducted by its Department of Scientific Research, is more guarded, stating that the hanging was 'likely woven circa 1400-1410 in France or the Southern Netherlands' and that it remains unclear exactly where, when, or for whom the Heroes tapestries were made. No weaver's mark, workshop stamp, or signature survives on the panel, and this record found no document that names a specific town, guild, or master weaver.

This research also could not confirm whether South Netherlandish represents a revision of an earlier French or Parisian catalogue attribution for this particular set. Every source consulted, back to the Museum's own 1953 monograph on the tapestries by curators James Rorimer and Margaret B. Freeman, already uses South Netherlandish. If an earlier French attribution existed and was formally revised, it was not found in the sources this record could verify, and the question is left open rather than answered by assumption.

How it was made, and what its dyes reveal

Tapestry of this kind is woven, not embroidered: the design is built directly into the cloth by weft threads of different colors passed back and forth across a fixed set of warp threads, a slow, labor-intensive process that for a hanging of this size would have required a substantial workshop and many months of work. The palette on the Julius Caesar panel runs from bright blues, greens, reds, and yellows in the principal figures to darker blues, beiges, and browns used for shading and depth.

In September 2022, as part of a long-term Museum project to study and conserve the whole Heroes series, conservators and scientists took thirty-seven samples of dyed wool from across the Caesar panel and analyzed them by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Three dark brown samples yielded a set of chlorinated compounds, published in 2024, that were traced to a lichen source and definitively identified as lichen xanthones, including thiophanic acid and arthothelin, matched against reference lichen specimens. It was the first time lichen xanthones of this kind had been identified in any historic object, and the first physical evidence that lichen dyes prepared by boiling water, rather than by the better-documented ammonia fermentation method, were in use before the eighteenth century. The exact species of lichen used remains unidentified; none of the known dye sources in the scientific literature produce the specific metabolites found in the tapestry.

From wall hanging to window curtain

At some point in the roughly five centuries between its weaving and its rediscovery, the set was cut apart. By the early twentieth century, the surviving fragments, including pieces that would later be identified as the Julius Caesar panel, had been resewn together and pressed into service as curtains in a French household. Who owned that household, and when or why the tapestries were dismembered in the first place, is not recorded in any source this research could verify. The fragments were photographed in their curtain form on 28 August 1947, immediately before restoration began, the last documentary trace of the tapestries in their damaged state.

How the fragments moved from that French household onto the market that eventually supplied the Metropolitan is likewise undocumented in the sources consulted for this record. A possible link to the dealer Joseph Brummer, whose own private collection the Museum acquired in 1947, appeared in secondary search results, but no primary document confirming that Brummer handled these specific tapestries could be located, so it is not asserted here.

Two campaigns, fifteen years apart

The Heroes tapestry fragments entered the Metropolitan's collection in two separate acquisitions. The first, in 1932, was a purchase made through the Munsey Fund, built from the bequest of newspaper publisher Frank Munsey. The second, in 1947, was a personal gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr., with a further, smaller gift the same year from George A. Douglass covering part of the Jewish Heroes hanging.

Several of the surviving panels carry composite accession numbers that record both campaigns on a single object: King Arthur is catalogued as 32.130.3a; 47.101.4, and Joshua and David as 32.130.3b; 47.101.1; 47.152. The Julius Caesar panel is different. Its accession number, 47.101.3, is a single 1947 number, meaning the fragments that make up this particular hanging arrived entirely in the Rockefeller gift, with no portion recovered in the earlier 1932 purchase. That distinction is itself a small piece of the reconstruction's documentary record: it tells a researcher, without needing to consult the Museum's internal files, which fragments were in hand fifteen years apart.

Rebuilding the heroes

The Museum received the tapestries in ninety-four separate fragments. Curators James Rorimer and Margaret B. Freeman worked out how the pieces fit together using black-and-white photographs, effectively solving the jigsaw on paper before a single stitch of physical restoration began. Turning that paper reconstruction into wall-ready tapestries fell to four hired needleworkers: Mathilda Sullivan, a former Museum employee who selected the wool threads for the project; Helen O'Brien Burke, the highest-paid of the four; Aline von Arx, a Swiss immigrant who became a United States citizen one month before starting the work; and Olga Wangen Larsen, a Norwegian immigrant and trained tapestry weaver who later worked on the Museum's Unicorn Tapestries.

Between them the four women logged 6,670 hours cutting apart, reassembling, piercing, and relining the fragments, work that ran from July 1947 to 15 May 1949, finishing just four days before the new Heroes Tapestries gallery opened at The Cloisters. Their contribution went largely unrecorded at the time; an undated photograph of two of them at work appeared unlabeled in the Museum's own Bulletin, and it took a 1955 Saturday Evening Post feature, focused mainly on Rorimer, to name them at all. Without their labor the set would have remained in fragments.

What the reconstruction still leaves uncertain

Only five of the original nine heroes survive in any form: Julius Caesar, King Arthur, Joshua and David together on one hanging, and a fifth figure the Museum itself catalogues with a question mark, 'Hector of Troy (?)'. That panel, accession 47.101.2d, would have hung alongside Caesar as the third member of the Classical Heroes group, but the Museum has not settled whether the surviving figure is Hector of Troy or Alexander the Great. Small fragments showing subsidiary figures, including bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who accompanied King Arthur's throne, also survive as separate catalogued pieces.

The other four heroes, whichever of Hector or Alexander is not accounted for by 47.101.2d, Judas Maccabeus, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, are not known to survive in any recognizable form. Whether fragments of them exist unidentified in another collection, or whether they were lost or destroyed before the set reached the Metropolitan, is not established in any source this record could verify.

What is happening to it now

None of the surviving Heroes panels received conservation treatment between their installation in 1949 and 2018, when the Metropolitan began a long-term project to study and conserve the whole group. King Arthur was treated first, with cleaning, stabilization, and reweaving of fragile areas completed and the panel reinstalled at The Cloisters by December 2022. Treatment and dye analysis of the Julius Caesar panel began in September 2022 and, as of this record's research, is still underway in the Museum's Department of Textile Conservation; the panel is currently off view. The 2024 dye-analysis paper describing the lichen finding notes that a fuller account of Caesar's own conservation and acquisition history is being prepared as a separate publication, not yet identified in the sources searched for this record.