Pleasure boats

There isn’t a luxury ship that wouldn’t look better for having sunk. Barnacles and rot bring such romance to the lines, like spider webs in the sea. Even the decay Damien Hirst has applied to his Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is quite appealing. It crawls over many of the objects that he claims to have salvaged from a shipwreck of the 1st or 2nd century ad. A mouldering Mickey Mouse. A bronze portrait of the artist encrusted in faux-coral. It’s Trimalchio meets Disneyland meets Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

It so happens that Hirst’s exhibition at the Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi in Venice (until 3 December) coincides with a search for another wreckage, this one truly ancient. Divers are currently scouring the bed of Lake Nemi near Rome for a pleasure boat once owned by Caligula. Two of the late emperor’s boats were raised from the same lake in the early 1930s upon the orders of Mussolini, only to be destroyed during the second world war. Fishermen say an even bigger boat is still down there. Caligula’s wreckage may be just the rival Hirst’s treasure boat needs.

Is there something a bit Caligula-like about Damien Hirst? The emperor’s interests are said to have included incest with his sisters, summary executions and expensive large-scale projects. It’s the third one really. Caligula apparently spent the entirety of his predecessor’s fortune in the first year of his rule alone (37 ad). Most of that money went on aesthetic, attention-grabbing constructions. Mountains were lowered, tunnels driven through rocks, villas thrown up. As for ships, Caligula’s biographer Suetonius says he kept luxurious galleys in Campania with ten banks of oars, jewel-bedecked sterns, multicoloured sails, baths, porticoes, dining rooms, vines and fruit trees. The two ships discovered at Nemi in the last century proved what was possible.