If you had all of the money you could ever dream of and then some, how would you want to memorialize your love for your spouse? It seems like the ongoing trend for lovestruck billionaires these days is to commission sculptures of their partners. This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared an Instagram post featuring his wife of 12 years, Priscilla Chan, next to an enormous statue of her in what appears to be their backyard, claiming he’s “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.”
Mr. Meta seems to have taken a leaf from fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos’s book, being that the latter had an unflattering carved wooden figurehead of his fiancée Lauren Sánchez affixed to the prow of his “megayacht” last year.
Zuckerberg commissioned American sculptor Daniel Arsham to create the seven-foot-tall (~2.1 meters) sculpture of Chan presented from head to toe in the artist’s signature Tiffany blue patina. Chan’s highly reflective silver robe drapes over her body, billowing above her shoulders like a pair of angel wings.
While it’s sweet in its sentiment and Chan’s likeness is certainly there, I’m finding that there’s an uncanny resemblance to the floating Manifest Destiny lady in John Gast’s “American Progress” (1872), featured in many United States history textbooks. I suppose that comparison isn’t totally unfounded considering Zuckerberg’s controversial, 1,500-acre (607-hectare) estate on the island of Kauai in Hawaiʻi and (since dropped) lawsuits aimed at stripping Native Hawaiians of communal ownership of their ancestral lands.
Neocolonial aesthetic projections aside, Zuckerberg, a storied fan of the first Roman Emperor Augustus, is indeed tapping into a long-lost facet of Ancient Roman culture. Augustus himself had devoted multiple architectural complexes, including a marketplace and a portico, to his wife, Livia Drusilla, that emphasized her beauty, elegance, loyalty, and roles as a mother, partner, and public patron. Surviving evidence indicates that devotional wife sculptures were a trend among non-Imperial Roman elite as well.
So, we now know that Zuckerberg’s Roman Empire isn’t just the actual Roman Empire, as the names of his three children would suggest — it’s also his wife. I only wish he’d gone with something more grand with all that money he has burning holes in his pockets. Something kinetic, something grandiose, something you can’t take your eyes off of … It’s just missing that ✨ wow ✨ factor for an ode to someone who’s been with him since his Harvard days. That calls for a Taj Mahal-like project, if you ask me.
Ah, well — at least Chan got a matching mug to go with it …
