The Livia convex mirror is part of a series where I am exploring the spectrum of color. Livia is in a color that is autumnal, reds, burgundys with flashes of blue. The stacks of spheres are red tiger eye and citrine.
This mirror is about 9 inches in diameter. It is currently in the San Francisco Desousa-Hughes showroom. Call 415.947.7000
Jewelry for walls.
Livia Drusilla (30 January 58 BC – 28 September 29 AD), also known as Julia Augusta after her formal adoption into the Julian family in AD 14, was the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus throughout his reign, as well as his adviser. She was the mother of the emperor Tiberius, paternal grandmother of the emperor Claudius, paternal great-grandmother of the emperor Caligula, and maternal great-great-grandmother of the emperor Nero. She was deified by Claudius who acknowledged her title of Augusta.
Sean Phillips as the dastardly Livia in the BBC I, Claudius series. Divine!
In the popular fictional work I, Claudius by Robert Graves, Livia is portrayed as a thoroughly Machiavellian, scheming political mastermind. Determined never to allow republican governance to flower again, as she felt they led to corruption and civil war, and devoted to bringing Tiberius to power and then maintaining him there, she is involved in nearly every death or disgrace in the Julio-Claudian family up to the time of her death. In her deathbed she only fears divine punishment for all she had done, and secures the promise of future deification by her grandson Claudius, an act which, she believes, will guarantee her a blissful afterlife. However, this portrait of her is balanced by her intense devotion to the well-being of the Empire as a whole, and her machinations are justified as a necessarily cruel means to what she firmly considers a noble aspiration: the common good of the Romans, achievable only under strict imperial rule.
Livia depicted as the goddess Ceres.
Livia’s bust found in Augustus’ necropolis in Rome.
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