Plopped among the stringy necks of Republican worthies, Julio-Claudian chiseled cheekbones, and Vespasian’s cultivated crag, this portrait in Copenhagen is a big fat outlier.
The fleshy marble giant is usually thought to represent Vitellius, famous for his diminutive reign and outsized appetites, with its unusual corpulence a nod to the emperor’s physical reality. If ancient sources (the ever-catty Suetonius) are to be believed, he gorged at four banquets a day, drank like a fish, and his gluttony was so pronounced he allegedly snatched victuals right off altars – sacrilege!
Gluttony (especially at this alarming scale) was a no-no among the upstanding class of politically viable men, going hand in hand with other moral failings such as drunkenness, sloth, and ‘womanly’ ‘eastern’ decadence. Generations before, it had been one of the excesses attributed to Marc Antony in a successful bid at character assassination in the home front. All to say, what peculiar mode of self-representation to say the least: a curious break during an uneasy chapter in Rome’s history.
