Dish with Scene of Caesar Receiving Head of Pompey,

1536

This large dish must have been an object of pride for its maker, for he dated it and noted its place of manufacture in Castel Durante. A few lines of text, also inscribed on the verso, explain the narrative subject on the front; they can be translated as follows: "Caesar, who after the betrayer of Egypt [the pharaoh Ptolemy] made him a gift of the honored head [of Pompey], concealing his obvious delight, wept outwardly, as it is written." These verses are taken from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, poems in the Italian vernacular in which the poet celebrates his lady love, Laura. In poem no. 102, he evokes Caesar hiding his pleasure upon seeing proof of his rival’s death and Hannibal smiling amidst his defeated, weeping people, as comparisons for his own comportment as a lover, laughing and smiling to hide the anguish of his weeping.

By the sixteenth century, Petrarch’s poems were literary classics in Italy and abroad, and educated people would have understood the original context of this quotation. Yet the subject of Caesar’s triumph over Pompey was popular enough that several maiolica objects showing this scene are known. In the same decade that this dish was made, The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), was published posthumously, in 1532. This Florentine political treatise recommends strategies and manners of acting to the rising ruler who would consolidate his power. This historical episode from Caesar’s ascent to domination of the Roman Republic — his final triumph in the civil wars over his rival Pompey — would have resonated with Renaissance princes, steeped in Classical models yet also newly schooled in the logic and art of statecraft by Machiavelli’s text.