For centuries, some of the most extraordinary pieces of Renaissance silverwork were telling the story of the wrong man.
The Aldobrandini Tazze are twelve large gilt-silver cups dedicated to the twelve Caesars of Suetonius. Each one is crowned by the figure of an emperor and, below, across the dish, four scenes from his life are worked in extraordinary detail. In theory, the system was simple: Julius Caesar should stand above the story of Julius Caesar; Nero above the story of Nero; Claudius above the story of Claudius.
But the pieces could be taken apart.
And at some point, someone began putting them back together incorrectly.
We do not know exactly who created the tazze, where they were made, who commissioned them, or for what occasion they were conceived. Their early history largely disappeared and, when the group resurfaced in London in 1826, it arrived with more questions than answers. For a time they were even thought to be the work of Benvenuto Cellini, an attribution later research rejected.
The real problem, however, was sitting in plain sight.
The twelve tazze had been designed to come apart easily, possibly to make storage or transport simpler. The figures of the emperors could be removed from the dishes and put back afterwards. It was practical, but also dangerously easy: once dismantled, nothing prevented an emperor from ending up on the wrong dish.
Vitellius Tazza, ca. 1587–99. Gilded silver; foot added after the mid-19th century. Unknown maker, probably Flemish, Antwerp. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain / Open Access.
The figures were identified. The dishes were not.
Rear view of the figure of Emperor Vitellius, from the Vitellius Tazza, ca. 1587–99. Gilded silver. Unknown maker, probably Flemish, Antwerp. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain / Open Access.
To work out which dish belonged to whom, it was necessary to recognize the tiny scenes represented on them and compare them with the episodes narrated by Suetonius in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. If someone did not know those stories precisely, it was perfectly possible to place a figure above a life that was not his own without noticing.
That is exactly what happened.
By the late nineteenth century, only Julius Caesar and Claudius were still correctly placed above their own stories. The other ten emperors stood over episodes belonging to another ruler.
This was not a minor cataloguing error hidden in a museum archive. For years, someone looking at one of these objects could be seeing one emperor while, directly beneath his feet, the life of another was being narrated.
The situation became even more complicated when the group was eventually dispersed among different owners. What had begun as a series of twelve related objects came to be studied, bought, and preserved separately. The tazze travelled, changed hands, were dismantled, restored, and altered, and every new separation made their original configuration harder to reconstruct.
They also changed physically.
When they resurfaced in the nineteenth century there was a strong preference for imagining Renaissance silver with a golden appearance, so the pieces received a thin layer of gold. Time had not only mixed up their protagonists: it had also altered the way the modern world expected those works from the past to look.
For a long time, then, the mystery of the Aldobrandini Tazze existed on two levels. The first was to discover who had created such a remarkable group. The second, perhaps even stranger, was to work out exactly what each surviving object actually was.
In 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art managed to bring the twelve tazze together so they could be studied as a group for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century. Historians, conservators, and scientists were able to compare materials, structures, scenes, and the alterations accumulated over centuries. It was almost an archaeological investigation applied to objects that, apparently, had never disappeared.
Because the tazze were still there.
What had been lost was their order.
The study made it possible to return the emperors to the stories that originally belonged to them and to reconstruct much of the structure of the group. The project culminated in the exhibition The Silver Caesars: A Renaissance Mystery, which opened in New York in 2017, where the works could be seen together publicly for the first time in more than a century and a half.
Solving that puzzle, however, did not solve the main mystery.
We still do not know with certainty who designed the tazze, which workshops took part in their production, who commissioned them, or exactly what their function was. The amount of silver used and the complexity of the work suggest that they must have been an exceptionally important commission, but no document has emerged that definitively explains their origin.
And perhaps that is precisely what makes their story so fascinating.
We think of museums as places where objects are protected from time, but preserving something does not mean preserving its identity intact. An object can survive while the name of the person who made it disappears. It can retain its form and lose its context. It can change owner, country, or meaning so many times that, eventually, even what once seemed obvious stops being so.
The Aldobrandini Tazze survived all of that. They survived travel, changes of ownership, restorations, mistaken attributions, and dispersal. But for generations they stopped telling their own story correctly.
Ten emperors stood over lives that were not their own, observed as if nothing were wrong.
And perhaps that is the strangest part of the entire story: not that the mistake was made, but that it could last for so long.
Because objects do not remember who they are by themselves. They need documents, context, comparisons, people who know how to read them and, sometimes, centuries of patience.
The tazze did not disappear.
What disappeared was certainty.
And for a very long time, no one knew who was who.