The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

  Denon conceived a series of monumental battlefield scenes starring a heroic Napoleon. To lend authenticity to the canvases, Denon sent draftsmen to the battlefields to take notes on everything from costumes to topography. Antiquity’s great generals had also invited artists along on their campaigns. Alexander the Great took artists to India. During Trajan’s Dacian campaign, artists were embedded in the Roman army, sketching scenes used later by sculptors for the famous column. These include scenes of the emperor supervising the crossing of the Danube, caring for his troops at a battlefield hospital, and demonstrating clementia to prisoners brought before him.

  One of Denon’s go-to artists was Antoine-Jean Gros, who took Jean-Germain Drouais’s place as David’s favorite student. Gros would later run David’s studio when his mentor was forced into exile.20 While in Genoa in 1796, Gros had the good fortune of meeting Joséphine who invited him to Milan. That December, he started Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole. Thanks to Joséphine, the artist got several sessions with his subject.

  After two days of fighting in November 1796, French troops captured Arcole, sealing the conquest of Northern Italy. Gros, who had been on the scene, depicted the young general as a dashing hero with long flowing hair, seizing a flag and leading an attack across the bridge. On Napoleon’s drawn sword, Gros inscribed “Armée d’Italie” to symbolize that his real weapon was his brave troops. According to eyewitnesses, the reality was less glamorous.

  Napoleon did not actually cross the bridge. Rather, he was stopped before the bridge when he was knocked into a ditch.21 Despite this, one of his generals, Antoine-François Andréossy, claimed that Napoleon’s actions resembled those of Caesar dismounting at Munda and running to the front lines to rally his troops.22 In a savvy investment, Napoleon paid to have Gros’s portrait engraved. The print helped launch his image as one of history’s great commanders.

  In the spring of 1802, Denon hired Gros to paint Bonaparte Visiting the Victims of the Plague at Jaffa. With his soldiers stricken by the plague, Napoleon visited a makeshift hospital in March 1799. In the original pencil sketch, Gros depicted Napoleon standing, holding a plague victim in his arms. The final painting was completely changed, perhaps at Denon’s suggestion. Gros portrayed Napoleon touching the sore in the armpit of one of his soldiers in a miraculous gesture of healing—in the tradition of Jesus Christ, the saints Roch and Carlo Borromeo, and the “king’s touch” of French and English royals. “The picture made Napoleon appear as a new ‘roi thaumatuge’ (healing king),” writes Walter Friedlaender.23

  Gros may have based Napoleon’s pose on the Apollo Belvedere. In his catalogue of the Museo Pio-Clementino, Visconti posited that the Athenians had commissioned Apollo Belvedere in praise of Apollo after a plague during the Peloponnesian War; the serpent at his feet represented medicine, which Apollo taught to men. As David O’Brien notes, Gros was familiar with both Visconti’s work and the famed statue that he helped pack up from the Vatican as a member of Napoleon’s arts commission.24

  The picture caused a sensation at the Salon of 1804. Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s formidable police prefect, said it was Napoleon’s most beautiful gesture. Artists hung a laurel wreath over the monumental canvas at the Louvre. Declaring the work a masterpiece, Denon wrote Napoleon: “The memory of the expedition to Egypt was still fresh in people’s minds, and the glory of the young artist, who had made sacred the memory of one event in this campaign, was as it were involved with the hero who had directed it. You are represented in it in a noble fashion, with the serenity of an exalted soul. . . . Your costume is admirable, your appearance spirited and accurate. Round you everyone is so moved with confidence and hope, that there is no feeling of the horror such a scene could inspire by its representation of all that is most disgusting in nature.”25

  Gros’s painting of Napoleon as a caring Samaritan also helped deflect attention from the massacre that coincided with the plague’s outbreak. In attacking Jaffa in March 1799, French troops slaughtered women and children in addition to soldiers. Napoleon ordered the massacre of an estimated two thousand Turkish prisoners on a nearby beach.26

  After his return from Egypt and coup d’état, Napoleon found himself on shaky ground. Advancing across Northern Italy, the Austrians defeated the French near Genoa in April 1800. Napoleon quickly launched the second Italian campaign, marching his army through the snowy Great Saint Bernard Pass crossed by Julius Caesar, Hannibal, and Charlemagne. After surprising the Austrians, his army defeated them decisively at the Battle of Marengo on June 14, 1800.

  Napoleon hurried back to Paris, but postponed his soldiers’ entry to stage a dramatic event for Bastille Day on July 14, 1800. News of the crossing spread quickly. Jacques-Louis David commemorated the event for Spain’s Charles IV in Bonaparte Crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass (1800–1801). Though Napoleon reportedly rode a mule, not a horse, and slid part way down the mountain into Italy on his behind, David portrayed him heroically riding a rearing white steed, his red cloak blowing in the wind.

  Like the adlocutio, or orator’s pose, seen in Roman coins, sculpture, and possibly the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, Napoleon’s right arm is raised and index finger pointed. In the left foreground, “Bonaparte” is etched on the rocks by the names of his predecessors, Hannibal and Charlemagne. At Napoleon’s feet, David added miniature soldiers hoisting a cannon up the mountain. Since Napoleon refused to pose, David convinced the first consul’s valet to lend him his uniform, red cloak, hat, sword, and boots, and dressed up a dummy as a model. The propaganda piece was so popular, Napoleon ordered three more copies.27

  On August 31, 1801, Interior Minister Jean-Antoine Chaptal proposed the creation of provincial art galleries across France. Napoleon signed the decree the next day, establishing fifteen museums in Rennes, Nancy, Dijon, Lyon, Nantes, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Lille, Rouen, Marseille, Toulouse, and Caen, along with Mainz, Geneva, and Brussels, annexed in 1797. Each museum was to have a small but encyclopedic collection of art with works from different schools, countries, and periods, along with an art college to develop local talent.28

  While keeping the most important art for the Louvre, Denon sent many paintings to the new provincial museums. In the process, Denon did not hesitate to dismember altarpieces, like his predecessors who seized the center of the Ghent Altarpiece. Denon would try to acquire the wings and Adam and Eve panels from the bishop and mayor of Ghent. When they refused, he offered to trade paintings by Rubens for the panels. Now Denon sent a Rubens altarpiece from Flanders to the Brera in Milan, and its predella to Dijon and Nancy. Two parts of a Mantegna predella went to Tours; the third stayed in Paris.29

  Excelling as museum director, Denon soon found himself running four prestigious luxury brands: Sèvres porcelain, Savonnerie carpets, and the Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry factories. He oversaw the minting of coins and medals and palace furniture, and managed major building projects. By 1811, his official responsibilities included “head of the museums of French monuments and of the French school at Versailles, the galleries of government palaces, the studios of chalcography [engravings on copper], gem-engraving and mosaics,” and the “buying and transport of works of art, the supervision of modern works ordered by the government and of archaeological digs at Rome.”30

  In addition to the provincial museums, Denon selected large canvases for Napoleon’s personal collection. The brilliant conversationalist charmed Joséphine who tapped him as her art adviser. Though the spoils of war were supposedly earmarked for the Louvre, she was given “temporary” custody of many Greco-Roman sculptures to decorate her apartments and parks. Denon also chose paintings for Malmaison where Joséphine formed a picture gallery.

  Before the Revolution, Denon had been keeper of the cabinet of carved gems inherited by Louis XV from Madame de Pompadour—miniature divinities, mythological heroes, and historical figures. Now Joséphine asked him to keep an eye out for cameos and turquoise for her on his travels.31 On one occasion, Joséphine wrote the intendant g
eneral of her husband’s military household, describing how Denon had a assembled a collection of cameos for her on his travels and asking him “if while on campaign you come across anything unusual in the way of pearls or gems, please buy them for me.”

  Anxious to please her, generals delivered pilfered cameos.32 According to Ernest Knapton, Joséphine’s collection amounted to “gifts,” “plunder and purchases on an extravagant scale.”33 During her own trip to Italy, Joséphine acquired coral and cameos from Naples, glass, mosaics, cameos, and intaglios from Rome, and copies of Greek and Roman jewels excavated from various archeological sites.

  First produced in Hellenistic times, cameos were wildly popular in ancient Rome. Early in his reign, Augustus’s official seal was an intaglio featuring a sphinx that belonged to his mother, followed by a seal with a portrait of Alexander the Great. The emperor finally commissioned a portrait of himself for his seal from the Greek master carver Dioskourides. His successors used this seal until the end of the Julian-Claudian dynasty.34 Throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Rome remained the center for cameo production. After Napoleon’s first Italian campaign, engraved gems enjoyed new popularity in France. Following the French invasion of Rome, Napoleon presented Joséphine with cameos—most famously the Vatican’s extraordinary Gonzaga Cameo.

  As a wedding gift, Napoleon had given Joséphine a simple ring with twin hearts. Now the first consul allowed his wife to use pearls and precious stones from the Trésor de la Couronne (Crown Jewels), which he began replenishing after the revolutionary dispersals. Joséphine amassed one of Europe’s best private jewelry collections, almost all in the symmetrical classical style with ancient motifs. As in ancient Rome, Joséphine’s jewels were a symbol of status and power.

  Joséphine wore some of the gems in her hair which she cut short like her husband, in a style evocative of antiquity. Worn short, tousled, and close to the head, fashionable hairstyles were named the Titus, à la Agrippine, or à la Phèdre (after the Greek mythological character Phaedra).35 The popularity of these hairstyles may have been inspired by plays like Racine’s Britannicus and Phèdre. Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito, based on Suetonius, helped sustain Titus’s reputation as one of Rome’s best emperors.

  Keen on reestablishing the prominence of Parisian jewelers, Napoleon supported his wife’s passion for carved gems. The art form was a favorite of the rulers of ancient Greece and Rome who often ascribed magical properties to gemstones. Emperors and elite Romans commissioned their portraits in intaglio, carved into the stone, along with the more labor-intensive cameos, carved in raised relief. Unlike Roman sculpture which went largely unsigned, the names of over seventy Greek and Roman gem engravers are known from their signatures.36

  In addition to popularizing neoclassical jewelry, Joséphine became an influential fashionista. Jacques-Louis David’s history paintings had underscored the parallels between antiquity and the new French Republic. Filled with classical costumes, the popular canvases helped make classical dress fashionable in France. According to E. Claire Cage, by incorporating classical aesthetics into their wardrobes, elite Parisians, such as Joséphine, Thérésa Tallien, and the celebrated salonnière Juliette Récamier, “drew upon an ennobling language of the arts and of the virtues and glory of antiquity.”37

  Though Joséphine called the shawls Napoleon brought back for her from Egypt “hideous,” she turned them into a signature fashion statement, evoking the drapery of antique statues. She owned several hundred shawls in cashmere, lace, gauze, and muslin embroidered in gold and silver.38 French women took lessons in how to drape their large scarves antique-style like Joséphine. They also bought her favorite perfume, Á la Cloche d’Argent, and lace from Chantilly and Brussels.39

  As Aileen Ribeiro writes, “Women so dressed, elegantly draped in the large cashmere shawls in fashion, and with which the most adept could create ‘antique’ poses, could easily be taken, in a flight of fancy, for those on vases or wall paintings. . . . The neoclassical . . . actually entered the mainstream of fashion, albeit in forms that would have been unrecognized by the ancient Greeks or Romans.”40

  Power dressing goes back to the ancient world when costume conferred legitimacy and authority. As Shelley Hales writes, “Costume would be crucial for imperial families whose claim to power lay, in not inconsiderable measure, in their very visibility. Emperors and their entourage were everywhere: in person around Rome, and in the thousands of images set up around the empire. Whilst portrait heads changed, imperial outfits remained largely constant . . .”41

  The triumphal costume connected its wearer toward the divine, adds Hales, from robes copied after those of Jupiter to the military cuirass associated with Mars. Triumphal garb was compulsory for Roman emperors at their own funerals.42 To reflect their position, imperial first ladies created their own looks, which featured jewels.43

  The quintessential garment for Roman men was the toga; married women wore the stola, often covered with a mantle or palla. But notes Michele George, “Togas, like the Romans who wore them, were not created equal.” Rome developed a complex system of dress determined by position and law. For example, the purple bordered toga, the toga praetexta, could only be worn by magistrates and children. The embroidered toga picta was worn exclusively for triumphant generals (sometimes bestowed on friendly foreign kings).

  As triumvir, Octavian issued an edict around 35 B.C.E. limiting the color purple to senators and magistrates. After the civil war, he required all citizens to don togas on public occasions in Rome.44 Later, togas were required dress for the daily morning salutatio where clients greeted patrons, along with imperial banquets. Around 162, Septimius Severus, fresh from North Africa, arrived at a banquet in Rome wearing a pallium. Marcus Aurelius reportedly lent the embarrassed future emperor one of his own togas. 45

  Like the Roman hierarchy of togas, France’s new Consulate established its own sartorial code to identify rank and office. In reaction to the revealing gowns of the Directory, Napoleon strongly encouraged Joséphine and her entourage to dress more modestly. To bolster the French textile industry, the first consul also banned Indian muslin (imported through England), and made formal dress obligatory for receptions. The result was a dramatic shift to more expensive velvet and satin gowns.46 Elaborate uniforms were also introduced for men. By decree, consuls and ministers, members of the Council of State and legislature, and prefects and senators were all required to wear heavily embroidered uniforms.47

  Napoleon would soon instate an even stricter dress code, reinforcing the social structure of his new Empire by evoking imperial Rome.

  FOUR

  PARISII

  In the summer of 53 B.C.E., Julius Caesar visited Parisii on the Île de la Cité and asked the Gallic tribes to support his campaign. Instead, Vercingetorix, king of Gaul, led an uprising against the Romans. The following year, Caesar dispatched a deputy, Titus Labienus, and four legions to crush the rebellion. After victories at the Battles of Lutetia (near today’s Eiffel Tower) and Alesia, Labienus rebuilt an abandoned village on the left bank of the Seine River.

  Lutetia, probably from the Latin word luta for swamp, followed the traditional Roman town design along a north-south axis, the cardo maximus. On the left bank, the main street followed today’s rue Saint-Jacques. It crossed the Seine and traversed the Île de la Cité on two wooden bridges, the Petit Pont and Grand Pont (today’s Pont Notre-Dame). A port was located on the island where the parvis in front of Notre Dame Cathedral is today.

  Like other Roman towns in France, Lutetia, capital of Roman Gaul, boasted a forum, theaters, baths, and a governor’s palace. The main building of the forum, near today’s Pantheon, was over three hundred twenty feet long and featured a temple dedicated to Jupiter, a basilica for civic functions, and a square portico with shops. Nearby, seventeen thousand fans, nearly the entire population of the town, packed an enormous oval amphitheater to watch comedies and dramas, and gladiators fight wild animals. For mock sea battles, the amphitheater wa
s flooded with water.

  Also near the forum was a large bath complex, the Thermes de Cluny. As in Rome, an aqueduct carried fresh water some ten miles from the Rungis plateau south of Paris to the baths. In addition to a thirty-foot pool, there was a frigidarium, or cold room, a three-room caldarium, or hot bath, with heated floors, a tepidarium or lukewarm bath, and areas for relaxing and exercise. Besides Roman architecture, the town enjoyed Roman cuisine, including wine, olive oil, and garum, a popular fish sauce similar to ketchup.

  Around the mid-third century, Christianity was introduced. When Saint Denis, Bishop of the Parisii, refused to renounce his faith, he was beheaded by the Romans on Mount Mercury. According to legend, Saint Denis picked up his head and carried it to a Christian cemetery some six miles away. The hill where he was executed became known as the Mountain of Martyrs, today’s Montmartre. A church was built on the site of his grave, Saint-Denis, the future necropolis of the kings of France.

  Early in the fourth century, Lutetia was renamed Civitas Parisiorum, or City of the Parisii after the Celtic tribe that originally settled the area in the third century B.C.E. By the late Roman Empire, the name was simplified to Parisius in Latin and Paris in French. Paris gained importance during the five-year rule of Julian the Apostate, Constantine’s nephew. After his soldiers proclaimed him Augustus or Emperor in 360, Paris enjoyed a brief period as capital of the Western Roman Empire (the next imperial coronation here was not until Napoleon’s in 1804). Near the end of the Roman Empire, emperors Valentian I and Gratian spent winters in the city.