The Aldobrandini Tazze

Twelve silver standing cups, each carrying a statuette of one of the Twelve Caesars above a dish chased with four scenes from that emperor's life. Forty-eight scenes, each traceable to a specific passage of Suetonius. They were made in the 1590s, probably in the Habsburg Netherlands, by goldsmiths whose names are not known, and they are the most important surviving set of Renaissance silver.

They were broken up in the mid-nineteenth century. Because the emperors unscrew from the dishes, and because each statuette carries its own name incised on its pedestal while the dishes do not, the figures got put back on the wrong dishes. By the end of the nineteenth century only two tazze of the twelve were correctly assembled. Most are still wrong today. Mary Beard noticed the problem at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the Domitian statuette stands over a dish about Tiberius.

In June 2014 all twelve were brought together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, correctly reassembled for the first time in more than a century, photographed and scientifically tested, and then taken apart again and sent home. The reconstruction is a book, not an object.

Twelve objects that were designed to be one

A tazza is a shallow dish on a stemmed foot. These twelve are large ones, standing between about 38 and 45 centimetres, each with a small statuette of a Roman emperor on a pedestal at the centre of the dish and four scenes from that emperor's life chased in relief in the concave well beneath him.

The set covers the Twelve Caesars of Suetonius, from Julius Caesar to Domitian, and across the twelve dishes the forty-eight scenes run through nearly a century and a half of Roman history. The scenes are not generic. Each of the forty-eight has been matched to a specific passage of Suetonius, and Mary Beard translated those forty-eight passages afresh for the 2017 catalogue so that they could be printed against the images.

That is the fact that governs everything else about this object. A set of twelve is an argument that only works complete, and the imagery on each dish is keyed to the emperor standing above it. Separate the pieces and you do not get twelve smaller works of art. You get a broken sentence.

The emperors are labelled and the dishes are not

Every statuette has its emperor's name incised on the top of its pedestal cap: IVLIVS, NERO, GALBA, CLAVDIVS, CALIGVLA, OTHO, VITELLIVS, AVGVSTVS. Two are cut by someone whose Latin was better than his letter-cutting, with the N reversed in DOMITIANVS and VESPASIANVS, and the Tiberius figure is incised TIWERIVS. The catalogue notes that these labels may not be original but that no reason has been found to doubt them.

The dishes carry no such thing. To know which emperor a dish belongs to you have to read the four scenes on it and identify the episodes in Suetonius. That is a research task, not a glance.

And the tazze come apart. They were built to be dismantled for storage and travel, and the components are interchangeable across the set: any emperor will screw on to any dish. A labelled figure, an unlabelled dish and a standard thread are the three conditions for exactly the disaster that followed.

How wrong it got

By the end of the nineteenth century only two of the twelve were correctly assembled: Julius Caesar and Claudius. Every other emperor was standing over somebody else's life.

The confusion is datable in places. A description of 1872 shows the Augustus figure already screwed into the Domitian dish. About a decade later a tazza carrying the Nero figure on the Titus dish was sold in Germany. Three of the six tazze owned by the Paris dealer Frederic Spitzer were mismatched when they were sold in 1893.

Somebody had tried to sort it out before. Eight of the dishes have names scratched on to them in a hand the catalogue dates as compatible with the nineteenth century, though possibly earlier. Some of those scratched names are right. Three are wrong, and wrong in a way that propagated: the Domitian dish is scratched Vespasian, the Caligula dish is scratched Domitian, and the Vespasian dish is scratched Caligula. An early attempt at identification became the authority for later mistakes.

So the underside of these dishes carries a layer of scholarship as well as a layer of ownership, and some of it is false. That is worth stating plainly because scratch inscriptions on silver are routinely read as evidence rather than as opinion.

Mary Beard, in a gallery, noticing

The modern unravelling began with a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mary Beard looked at what the museum showed as the Domitian tazza and saw that the dish beneath the Domitian statuette was chased with scenes from the life of Tiberius.

That single observation led to a trail of similar misidentifications across the set. It is a good illustration of what this kind of error costs and how it survives: the object had been in a national museum since 1956, catalogued, published and displayed, and the mistake was visible to anyone who could read the pictures. Most people cannot, because reading them requires Suetonius.

The V&A tazza is still Domitian above Tiberius. It is plate 3 of the catalogue, given by Dr W. L. Hildburgh in 1956 and accessioned M.247-1956.

June 2014: twelve in one room

On 18 and 19 June 2014 the Metropolitan Museum of Art assembled all twelve tazze in New York, with an international group of specialists, for a symposium made possible by the Schroder Foundation, Selim K. Zilkha and an anonymous donor. Among the speakers and chairs were Ellenor Alcorn, Denise Allen, Mary Beard, Michele Bimbenet-Privat, Linda Borsch, Ian Campbell, Federico Caro, Wolfram Koeppe, Ernst-Ludwig Richter, Xavier F. Salomon, Timothy Schroder, William Stenhouse, Luke Syson, Pierre Terjanian, Ubaldo Vitali, Stefanie Walker and Mark T. Wypyski.

Three things happened that could not have happened any other way. The figures and dishes were unscrewed and put back in their correct pairings for the first time in over a century. The whole set was photographed by Joseph Coscia Jr and Juan Trujillo of the museum's imaging department in a campaign that made the forty-eight scenes legible in detail for the first time. And scientific testing was run across objects that are normally thousands of miles apart.

Then the tazze were dismantled again and went back to their owners in the configurations they arrived in. This is the point most accounts miss. The 2014 reunion corrected the set on paper and in photographs. It did not correct the objects. The catalogue says so in as many words: most of the emperors still stand above another ruler's history.

The exhibition, and what it was not

The exhibition that followed, The Silver Caesars: A Renaissance Mystery, ran at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 12 December 2017 to 11 March 2018 and at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire from 18 April to 21 July 2018. The catalogue was edited by Julia Siemon and published by the museum in 2017.

A reader should be clear about what the twelve were doing in those two rooms. They were together, which for a dispersed set is the whole event. They were not reunited in the sense of being reassembled into one object with one owner, and nothing about the exhibition changed the ownership of anything.

Where they actually are

The set is now in seven countries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds two: the Vitellius, bought with the Fletcher Fund in 1945, and the Claudius, which was a private loan in 2017 and which the museum bought outright with the Wrightsman Fund in 2024. Both are in gallery 520.

The others: the Julius Caesar tazza at the Museo Lazaro Galdiano in Madrid; the Domitian figure on the Tiberius dish at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Galba figure on the Caligula dish at the Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida in Lisbon; the Titus dish, alone and with no figure, at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon; the Otho tazza at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, from the collection of Viscount and Viscountess Lee of Fareham and given in trust by the Massey Foundation; the Augustus figure on the Domitian dish at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Four remain private: the Nero figure on the Augustus dish in the Zilkha Collection in Los Angeles; the Caligula figure on the Galba dish in the Schroder Collection in London; the Tiberius figure on the Nero dish, on loan to the Metropolitan Museum; and the Vespasian tazza in a private collection in London. A thirteenth object, wholly nineteenth-century, is also in private hands.

The thirteenth tazza is a fake, and it is part of the set

The catalogue prints thirteen plates for twelve tazze, and the reason is the best single story in the object's history.

The original Titus statuette is lost. The original Titus dish survives, but it is in Lisbon on its own. So the thing that stands in for the Titus tazza today is made entirely of nineteenth-century replacements: a figure that is a copy of the Julius Caesar statuette, incised TITVS, standing on an electrotype copy of the Titus dish, on a replaced foot. It weighs 3,313.8 grams, appreciably more than any of the originals, which run between 2,701 and 2,982 grams.

The electrotype gives itself away under examination. It was made in five panels, four for the narrative band and one for the centre, where a mature electrotype would be a single deposit. Its reverse is smooth and lacks the nodules that electrolytic deposition leaves, which suggests it was left in the solution until a very heavy layer had built up and was then filed down. Elkington's later electrotypes are much lighter and thinner. The construction suggests an early production, made in pieces because the technology had not been mastered.

The composite Titus is not a forgery in the sense of something made to deceive a modern buyer. It is a Victorian repair of a gap, and it is now itself a historical object. But it means that any statement of the form 'all twelve survive' is false, and this record does not make it.

The gold on it is Victorian

Everyone calls these objects silver-gilt, and the Metropolitan catalogues its two as gilded silver. The gilding was applied between 1862 and 1872, before the set was dispersed. It is not sixteenth-century.

This is the kind of fact that quietly rewrites an impression. A reader looking at a photograph of a tazza is looking at a gold surface that was put on around the time of the second Reform Act, over relief that was chased under Philip II. The object's most immediately striking visual quality is the newest thing about it.

It was not the only improvement. Electrotype copies of the dishes were made and the emperor figures were replicated in bronze, so nineteenth-century copies of these objects circulate independently of the originals.

Six of the feet were made by a forger

The Parisian dealer Frederic Spitzer acquired six of the tazze and had their fluted feet replaced with more elaborate substitutes. For decades those elaborate feet were widely regarded as original, and were admired as such.

In 1970 the silver scholar John F. Hayward published an article demonstrating that they are not. The catalogue calls the replacement on the Vespasian tazza a Vasters foot, which places it with Reinhold Vasters, the Aachen goldsmith whose designs for pastiche Renaissance goldsmiths' work were identified only after a folio of his drawings reached the Victoria and Albert Museum, and whose hand is now recognised in Renaissance collections across Europe and America.

So the feet on this set fall into three classes and a record has to keep them apart: original fluted feet, still on five of them; plain replacements added after the middle of the nineteenth century; and the elaborate Spitzer feet, at least one of which is given to Vasters. The Metropolitan states the replacement in the date field of its own Vitellius record rather than burying it in a condition note, which is the right way round.

What the marks actually say

Silver is normally dated and placed by assay marks, which is why silver is one of the best-documented classes of object in the decorative arts and also the most forged. This set has almost none of that, and what it does have is mostly about the nineteenth century.

There is no maker's mark, no town mark and no date letter of the period of manufacture. A star over the letter M within a shield is struck on the threaded surface of the baluster stem of the Vitellius tazza and of the composite Titus, and it is not identified.

Nearly every component carries nineteenth-century control marks. Those are real hallmark evidence, and they date the set's passage through the nineteenth-century trade rather than its manufacture. An assay mark on this object is testimony about Spitzer's Paris, not about the workshop.

The other inscriptions are owners' and cataloguers' additions: the emperors' names incised on the pedestal caps, the names scratched on the undersides of eight dishes, and the Aldobrandini coat of arms, pricked on the underside of five dishes and engraved on the upper surface of the Titus dish in Lisbon. Pricking is a line of separate punched dots rather than a cut line, and it is an owner's mark added to a finished object.

The name is wrong, or at least late

The set is named after Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, 1571 to 1621, nephew of Pope Clement VIII. He did not commission it.

Stefanie Walker found documents in the cardinal's accounts registering payment for six tazze on 26 March 1602, bought by his agents in Milan. In 1603 all twelve appear in the inventory of his silver, the first known reference to the complete set, also found by Walker. His accounts show no purchase of the other six at any point. Three letters from an agent named de' Cervi, of 1599, record the tazze being offered to the Duke of Mantua, who declined, and establish that they were never owned by the Este of Ferrara.

Julia Siemon proposes an origin that fits the gap: that the tazze were made in the Habsburg Netherlands in the 1590s, possibly with the Austrian archdukes in mind, and that Archduke Albert of Austria brought them to Ferrara in the autumn of 1598 for his wedding to Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, presenting six to his host, Cardinal Pietro. That is a proposal argued from documents and comparanda, and this record reports it as one.

What is settled is the negative: the man the set is named after was not its patron, and the name records a collector who acquired it in halves, at least one half on the open market in Milan, fifteen years or so after it was made.

Out of Italy, into the London trade

The cardinal left the tazze to his sister, and they descended through her family, passing among the Borghese, Pamphilj and Doria Pamphilj. The last record of them in Italy is a document of 1769 returning ownership to the Borghese.

Then they leave, and the most likely reading is that they were sold out of Italy before 1792. The context matters: in the late eighteenth century most noble silver collections in Rome were destroyed by papal and Napoleonic campaigns to reclaim precious metal. A set of twelve large silver dishes surviving that period at all is a piece of luck, and being sold abroad is very probably what saved it.

There is then a gap of more than fifty years. The tazze reappear in 1826 in the shop of a London dealer and silversmith. Nothing is documented in between.

The market, in four figures a century apart

The tazze belonged to Charles Scarisbrick of Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, who rebuilt his house in the Gothic style and collected classical gems, intaglios and cameos and the canvases of John Martin. No reference to the tazze has been found in the Scarisbrick archives and it is not known when he bought them or how he showed them.

At his posthumous sale at Christie's in 1861 they were the most expensive lot by a distance, making 1,280 pounds, more than twice the price of any of his pictures. That figure needs one piece of context that catalogues rarely supply: Christie's charged no buyer's premium in 1861, the premium having been introduced in 1975, so 1,280 pounds is a hammer price and there is no second figure hiding behind it.

The buyer was Richard Attenborough, a London dealer who was also a pawnbroker, goldsmith, silversmith, diamond and pearl merchant and appraiser, and who lent two of the tazze to the landmark loan exhibition at the South Kensington Museum the following year. Frederic Spitzer had six by the time of his sale in 1893; a photograph of about 1890 shows two of them on a table in his study in Paris.

Then the twentieth century. In 1982 the Vespasian tazza, still on its Vasters foot, made 231,000 US dollars. In 2000 the Nero figure on the Augustus dish was sold from the Wernher collection for 1 million pounds. For neither of those two does the source say whether the figure is the hammer or the price with premium, and after 1975 those are different numbers. This record therefore does not enter either as a hammer.

The missing book

A manuscript once travelled with the set, credited with describing all the scenes. It had forty-nine pages, which is very close to the forty-eight images chased on the dishes, and the arithmetic is the reason it is thought to have been the key to reading them.

It has been lost since 1893, the year of the Spitzer sale.

That is the sharpest single loss in this object's history. The forty-eight scenes had to be identified again in the twenty-first century, passage by passage, out of Suetonius, because the guide that came with them went missing at the moment the set was broken up. A finding aid and the thing it describes were separated by the same event.