Mark Zuckerberg unveils new statue of his wife in ‘Roman tradition’

If you had all the money you could ever dream of and then some, how would you want to commemorate your love for your spouse? It seems like the current trend among billionaires in love is commissioning sculptures of their partners. This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared an Instagram post featuring his wife of 12 years, Priscilla Chan, next to a massive statue of her in what appears to be their backyard, saying he’s “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.”

Mr. Meta appears to have taken a cue from fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, who last year had an unflattering wooden figurehead of his fiancée Lauren Sánchez affixed to the bow of his “mega-yacht.”

Zuckerberg commissioned American sculptor Daniel Arsham to create a 7-foot-tall sculpture of Chan, presented head to toe in the artist’s signature Tiffany blue patina. Chan’s highly reflective silver dress drapes over her body, floating above her shoulders like a pair of angel wings.

While the sentiment is sweet and the resemblance to Chan is there, I find it uncannily similar to the floating lady from Manifest Destiny in John Gast’s “American Progress” (1872), which is featured in many U.S. history textbooks. I suppose the comparison is not entirely unfounded, given Zuckerberg’s controversial 1,500-acre property on Hawaii’s Kauai and the (since dropped) lawsuits seeking to strip Native Hawaiians of communal ownership of their ancestral lands.

Beyond neocolonial aesthetic projections, Zuckerberg, an undisputed fan of the first Roman emperor Augustus, is indeed tapping into a long-forgotten facet of ancient Roman culture. Augustus himself dedicated several architectural complexes, including a marketplace and portico, to his wife, Livia Drusilla, which highlighted her beauty, elegance, loyalty, and roles as mother, partner, and public patron. Surviving evidence indicates that devotional sculptures of wives were also a trend among the non-imperial Roman elite.

So now we know that Zuckerberg’s Roman Empire is not only the Roman Empire itself, as the names of his three children suggest, but also his wife. I wish he had gone for something more grandiose with all that money burning a hole in his pocket. Something kinetic, something grandiose, something you can’t take your eyes off of… It just lacks that wow factor for an ode to someone who has been with him since his Harvard days. It needs a Taj Mahal-type project, if you ask me.

Ah, well, at least Chan got a matching mug to go with it…