18 July. The last type of coin minted by Vitellius were aurei and denarii with the goddess Victory building a trophy, likely alluding to his hopeful victory against the incoming armies of Vespasian. In art Busts from the time of Vitellius, particularly the one in the Capitoline Museums, represent him as broad-faced with several double chins, and it is this type which informs paintings of the emperor from the Renaissance on. There were once other ancient busts claimed to be of Vitellius which later scholarship has proved to be of someone else. The features of the Grimani Vitellius particularly, according to Mary Beard, were once used by painters to suggest that the character who bears them is destined to come to a bleak end. Another such bust figures in Michiel Sweerts' Baroque genre piece of a young art student drawing a copy. The Grimani portrait bust also served as the model for one by Giovanni Battista and Nicola Bonanome (ca.1565), one of a series of The Twelve Caesars that were once fashionable in large households. The series was also a popular subject for paintings, of which there have been examples by Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Otto van Veen, and many others. Several 19th-century French artists pictured the violent end of Vitellius. That by Georges Rochegrosse (1883) depicts him being dragged by the populace down the steep Gemonian stairs, stretching from high on the canvas to its foot [see above]. There he appears bound and surrounded by a gesticulating mob with hooting ragamuffins at their head. The stairs are covered with the rubbish with which the deposed emperor has been pelted and, as Suetonius describes the scene, a long blade is held at his throat so that he cannot look down. Others paintings show the moment of his execution, of which there are examples by :fr:Charles-Gustave Housez, Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (1847), Jules-Eugène Lenepveu (1847), and an engraving by Edouard Vimont (1876-1930). Much as the appearance of Vitellius prefigured approaching doom in earlier centuries, Thomas Couture pictures him in shadow to the left of centre in the painting The Romans in their Decadence (1847). This was shown prophetically at the Paris Salon in the year before the French Revolution of 1848 toppled the July Monarchy. In literature The earliest fictional appearance of a Vitellius was of the Roman Consul in Syria, Lucius Vitellius (the father of Aulus), who intervened in Judaean affairs in