Gold aurei of the Twelve Caesars

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The coins are mounted in a matching pair of nineteenth-century gold bracelets that are also decorated with oblong amethysts en cabochon. The jewelry may have been fashioned by the firm of Castellani in Rome and was inspired by the early second-century A.D. writer Suetonius' biographies of the first twelve rulers of imperial Rome, which started with Julius Caesar and ended with Domitian. One bracelet contains aurei of the dictator Julius Caesar and the Julio-Claudian emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the other has coins of the emperors of the civil war in A.D. 69—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—and the Flavian emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than thirty thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period (ca. 4500 B.C.) to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312. It includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America. The geographic regions represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: Greek colonies were established around the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea, and Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.

Metropolitan Museum of Art