Portraiture’s inferiority to
history painting within the hierarchy of genres dictated by the European Académies became a subject of much
debate throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the eighteenth
century, artists, seeking to work within the grand style of history painting,
but needing the financial security that portrait painting guaranteed, developed
a “mixed” portrait that fused the representational nature of portraiture with
the allegorical nature of history painting. “These ‘mixed’ portraits,” writes
Christopher M. S. Johns, “which challenged the traditional academic
undervaluing of portraits vis-à-vis history
painting in the long-established hierarchy of the genres, are characteristic of
a more widespread phenomenon in eighteenth-century visual culture that sought
to subvert, or a least to reconfigure, the traditionally defined parameters of
the various genres.”[1] These portraits
maintain the general likeness of their subjects but also endow them with the
idealized features of classical deities and heroes. Contemporary dress is discarded
in favor of the nude and minimal drapery, removing the individuals from their actual
environment and placing them within the context of history painting. Allegorical
portraits of women were among the most popular varieties of painting and
sculpture to emerge during the French Rococo period. Jean-Marc Nattier, for
example, portrayed the marquise de Pompadour as a classical goddess in his Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour en Diane
chasseresse (1746)
(fig. 1). In this mythological portrait of Louis XV’s mistress, Nattier includes such classical
iconography as Diana’s bow and arrow and, as goddess of the hunt, places her
within the forest. In the 1780s and 1790s, with the rise of the severe
Davidian neoclassicism, the allegorical portrait fell out of style, but reemerged
as an important form of painting and sculpture during the French Consulate and
Imperial periods.
Under
both the Consulate and the Empire, the government utilized art as a means of
shaping the public’s perceptions of the Napoleonic regime. Artists drew from a
variety of artistic forms and iconographical traditions in order to establish a
visual language for creating Napoleonic propaganda. Many of these representations of the Napoleonic regime were
executed in the visual language of classical history painting, such as
Antoine-Jean Gros’s Bonaparte Visiting
the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa (1804) (fig. 2). But in addition to the grand
style, the government also commissioned works that drew upon the eighteenth
century tradition of the mythological or allegorical portrait. Among the
greatest of these works was the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova’s Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker (1803-6)(fig.
3). Antonio Canova sought to “elevate the work beyond portraiture to approach
the more exalted excellencies of history” by depicting Napoleon in the guise of
the classical god Mars.[2]
Napoleon
was initially apprehensive about being depicted as a classical nude, but
following the insistence of Canova and Dominique-Vivant Denon,
Directeur-Général du Musée Central des Arts, he agreed. [3]
Canova “insisted that the sophistication of the concept and the self-conscious
appeal to history that Napoleon himself desired could be achieved by the
classic, universal quality that only nudity could express.”[4]
By presenting him as the Roman god of war, but also as a Peacemaker, Canova
shows Napoleon as a powerful military ruler as well as a successful diplomat
and statesman. This tradition of deifying rulers through artistic
representation can be traced to the sculpture of Classical Antiquity. The Roman
Emperor Augustus was deified in a sculpture from the first quarter of the first
century, in which the Roman ruler is portrayed as the god Jupiter. Like Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, Augustus
is presented in the nude, wearing minimal drapery. Both Augustus and Napoleon
hold figures of the goddess of victory, Nike, in their right hands, while
gripping scepters with their left.
These classical symbols of both civic and military power firmly establish
Canova’s sculpture of Napoleon within the Classical tradition. When the
sculpture was finally brought to Paris in 1811, however, presumably to be
installed in the Musée Napoléon (now the Musée du Louvre), Napoleon was
displeased and ordered it to be kept away from the public. Following the fall
of Napoleon and the subsequent ascension of Louis XVIII to the French throne,
the sculpture was sold to the Duke of Wellington for 66,000 francs in 1816. The sculpture remains in the stairwell
at Apsley House, the London residence of the Duke of Wellington after his
victory over Napoleon at Waterloo.
[1] Christopher
M. S. Johns, “Portrait Mythology: Antonio Canova’s Portraits of the Bonapartes”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 1
(Autumn 1994): 116.
[2] Johns, “Portrait
Mythology,” 119.
[3] David
O’Brien, After the Revolution:
Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting and Propaganda Under Napoleon (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 168.
[4] Johns,
“Portrait Mythology,” 122.
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