Lot Essay
A complete set of all twelve Caesars of identical design, also with each emperor named and numbered, decorate the feet of a pair of candlesticks in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (Verdier, loc. cit. with further examples). The heads are arranged so that the odd-numbered Caesars look to sinister, and the even-numbered ones look to dexter. The idea of grouping the twelve Caesars goes back at least to the time of Suetonius' lives of them, which did not shirk from dwelling on the moral weaknesses so powerfully brought to life in these likenesses.