Mary Beard, Cambridge University

This six-part lecture series examines the continuing engagement throughout history with images of Roman emperors and its impact on Western visual art and culture. In this fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 1, 2011, the esteemed classicist and professor Mary Beard considers the fluid, dynamic, and productive category of emperor groups, which became a popular theme of Western art following the first printing of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars in 1470.