by Susan Jaques
The herald proclaimed: “the most glorious, the most august emperor Napoleon, emperor of the French, is crowned and enthroned emperor, Long live the Emperor!” Cries of “Vive l’Empereur” rose inside the cathedral, echoed by canon salvoes. With their cortege, France’s new emperor and empress returned to the archbishop’s palace to change their robes. Pius left the sacristy and returned to the cathedral, proceeding out to Tu es Petrus.
Despite the setting and presence of the pope, the religious nature of the sacre had been understated. An enthusiastic crowd waited in the falling snow to see the imperial procession. Around four o’clock, the procession left Notre Dame and headed toward the Place du Chatelet, returning to the Tuileries via the rue and the Place de la Concorde. The streets had been strewn with flowers and paper lanterns. At about six-thirty, the imperial couple reached the palace; Pius arrived about seven. During this time, there was a scramble at the cathedral as some twenty thousand guests tried to leave.
That evening, Napoleon and Joséphine dined together in the Tuileries. The city of Paris presented the couple with the 1,069-piece Grand Vermeil service by goldsmith Henri Auguste, architect Jacques Molinos, painter Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, and sculptor Jacques-Edme Dumont. Among the spectacular gilded silver objects were his and her nefs, spice cellars in the shape of ships, long associated with France’s royals.
As Odile Nouvel-Kammerer describes, the emperor’s nef featured a figurehead on the prow representing Fame on a wolf’s head rostrum, holding a laurel wreath. Justice and Prudence sit at the prow on either side of Charlemagne’s crown, resting on a helmet. Atop the lid, Napoleonic bees fly toward the prow. Large bas-reliefs adorn the sides—including a depiction of the coronation and the presentation of gifts from the city of Paris. At the base, a male and a female figure representing the Seine and Marne support the spice cellar on their heads while steering the rudder. The nef rests on a base decorated with the initial N and imperial eagles in laurel wreaths.19
After the meal, Napoleon looked out on the illuminated gardens of the Tuileries. The grande allée was lined with brightly shining columns, reflecting the light from thousands of colored lamps hanging from the tree branches. An unmanned balloon fitted with three thousand lights and shaped like an imperial crown was launched from Notre Dame. Forty-six hours later, the balloon landed in Lake Bracciano near Rome. Considering this an omen of his destiny, Napoleon suggested the balloon be displayed in Rome.
Napoleon used his coronation to garner public support. For several days, Paris celebrated with festivals, military displays, banquets, balls, receptions, and official ceremonies. Lights on the façade of the Tuileries Palace created a magnificent effect, the garden was brilliantly lit with two rows of illuminated arches bordering the great alley and surrounding the parterres. Public entertainments were organized throughout France, from street theater, games, and music to fireworks over the Seine and balloon releases. Medals were distributed with Napoleon’s portrait.
On December 5, Napoleon and Joséphine left the Tuileries at eleven A.M. for the parade grounds of the Champs de Mars accompanied by his family, officers of the Empire, and Mamelukes. Two decades earlier, Napoleon drilled here as a student at the École Militaire. Percier and Fontaine designed an elaborate two-story stage. The imperial couple climbed a grand staircase to a monumental portico and colonnade hung with drapery and took their seats on thrones. The entire length of the façade was decorated by a covered gallery. From the parade grounds to the Seine, soldiers stood in tight formation.
Donning his gold laurel leaf crown and coronation robe, Napoleon presented the army regiments and National Guard with the Empire’s new emblem—eagles based on the Aquila of the legions of Rome. Designed by Antoine-Denis Chaudet and cast in bronze in six pieces and gilded by Pierre-Philippe Thomire, the 3.5-pound eagles had a 9.5-inch wingspan and measured 8 inches in length. Mounted on top of the blue regimental flagpoles, the eagles were on a plinth, with one claw resting on Jupiter’s thunderbolt spindle, wings slightly spread and heads turned to the right. The eagle rested on a box indicating the number of the various regiments, with a dowel to attach the emblem to the flagstaff.
Like Rome’s emperors delivering the adlocutio, France’s new emperor addressed his troops:
“Soldiers, behold your standards! These eagles will always serve as your rallying point. Will you swear to defend them with your life?”
To this, the troops shouted “We Swear!”20
Like the Roman legions, Napoleon’s Grande Armée would carry the eagle into battle as a symbol of France’s imperial power. Standard-bearers were expected to defend the standards with their lives, like Roman standard-bearers and medieval bearers of the oriflamme. “The loss of an eagle is an affront to regimental honour for which neither victory nor the glory acquired on a hundred battlefields can make amends,” wrote Napoleon.21
In 1804, Denon commissioned a commemorative medal of Pius and Notre Dame from his protégé, engraver Jean-Pierre Droz. Shown in right profile, Pius wears the three-tier papal tiara and ecclesiastical garments. The reverse featured the façade and north side of Notre Dame with Percier and Fontaine’s decorations. The double date of the ceremony in Gregorian and revolutionary calendars and the inscription imperator sacratus invoked Napoleon. Romain-Vincent Jeuffroy also designed a commemorative medal series including the Coronation at Paris, Coronation festivities, Standards presented to the Army, and Napoleon’s planned Invasion of England.
In one of the medallions, Jeuffroy depicted Napoleon in Caesar-like profile. On the reverse, the emperor stands on a shield carried by a senator and a soldier beneath the inscription “le senat et le peuple.” A similar medallion minted in 1643 shows four-year-old Louis XIV sitting on a shield held high by figures of France and Providence.22
The custom of acknowledging a new leader by raising him on a shield can be traced back to 360 C.E. when Flavius Claudius Julianus, known as Julian the Apostate, was proclaimed Roman emperor by his soldiers in Paris. As Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus writes: “he [Julian] was placed upon an infantryman’s shield, raised on high and was hailed by all as Augustus.”23 The tradition was continued by the Franks who replaced the rectangular shield of the Romans with a circular shield. In Jeuffroy’s medallion, Napoleon I is shown standing on the round Frankish shield, which also appears to be the model for one of his many thrones.24
In his studio in the former chapel of the College of Cluny near the Sorbonne, Jacques-Louis David went to work. In October, the fifty-six-year-old artist received a commission from Napoleon for a four-painting series to commemorate the coronation. The emperor’s personal involvement was unusual. Since his appointment as director of the Louvre, Dominique-Vivant Denon handled most official dealings with artists. To David, Napoleon’s participation underscored the commission’s importance. He was about to immortalize the most important moment of Napoleon’s extraordinary career.
David’s own path to the position of “First Painter of the Emperor” began three decades earlier. In 1774, after four tries, he won the prestigious Prix de Rome. He spent the next five years studying ancient sculpture and Renaissance painting. Like his fellow neoclassicists, David most valued the ancient monuments of Rome. Back in Paris, he enjoyed great success with his historical, classicizing scenes including the Oath of the Horatii commissioned by the king of France. David soon became an influential leader of the French Revolution. As head of the Revolutionary Committee for General Security, he signed death warrants for several hundred people, including his patron Louis XVI.
By the time David met Napoleon Bonaparte at an official reception in 1797, he was France’s most celebrated painter. Having failed to enlist Antonio Canova, the ambitious young general began wooing David. Though the painter declined Napoleon’s invitation to join the Egyptian campaign on the grounds that he was too old for the adventure, he persuaded the general to sit for a portrait. “At last my friends,” he told his students after the session, “this is a man to whom one would have
raised altars in antiquity; yes, my friends; yes my dear friends; Bonaparte is my hero!” About Napoleon’s head, the David declared: “It is pure, it is great, it is beautiful as antiquity.”25
After the second Italian campaign and coup, the first consul summonsed David to execute another portrait. When David shared that he was currently working on The Battle of Thermopylae, Napoleon told him, “you are wrong, David, to waste your time depicting losers.”
David defended the subject, explaining that the three hundred heroes died keeping the Persians out of Greece.
“No matter,” replied Napoleon. “Only the name of Leonidas has reached us. All the rest is lost to history.”
In response to David’s request for a sitting, Napoleon replied, “Sit? What for? Do you think that the great men of antiquity whose images have come down to us ever sat?”
Walking the artist out, Napoleon’s brother Lucien explained: “You see, my dear David, he loves only the subjects of national history, because he can play a part in them. It’s his weakness: he’s rather fond of being talked about.”26
Now with the monumental Napoleon Crowning Joséphine, also known as the Sacre, David hoped to show his superiority to both the Venetian Renaissance master Paolo Veronese, whose recently confiscated Wedding at Cana was the Musée Napoléon’s largest painting, and Peter Paul Rubens’s Coronation of Marie de Medici cycle then at the Luxembourg Gallery.27 Marie de Medici was the last French queen to be anointed nearly two hundred years earlier in 1610.
To lend his canvas authenticity, David had plans of Notre Dame delivered to his studio and borrowed Biennais’s “Charlemagne” crown. Using cardboard models and wax figures, David reconstructed the interior of Notre Dame. Several of the coronation’s participants came to his studio to pose. Thanks to Joachim Murat, David wangled private sittings with his wife Caroline (Napoleon’s sister) and Joséphine, and Pius VII. “I shall have painted an emperor, and finally a pope!” “I will slip into posterity in the shadow of my heroes,” David famously declared.28
Like Rubens in the Coronation of Marie de Medici, David used a rich palette to recreate Notre Dame’s lavish décor and the colorful costumes of the imperial couple, family members, and courtiers. An initial preparatory sketch showed the shocking moment when Napoleon crowned himself and pressed his sword to his heart. But believing that image sent an overly authoritarian message, Napoleon may have instructed David to change the scene, to show him in a more chivalrous light. David re-sketched the composition, with Napoleon raising the crown in the air, about to anoint Joséphine.29 Napoleon would compare himself to a “French knight.”
David made other changes to the canvas in deference to his powerful patron. Napoleon had banned his brothers Lucien and Jérôme from the service; his mother refused to attend. With Napoleon insisting on an image of family unity, David added the absent relatives. Wearing a diadem, Madame Mère is shown in the center of the canvas, looking down on her son’s coronation from a front row seat in the first level of the VIP gallery. In his propagandistic use of imperial family imagery, Napoleon was invoking Rome’s emperors. The same kind of historical revision appears in Roman reliefs. For example, Augustus’s son-in-law Agrippa, dead at the time of the procession, appears on the relief at Augustus’s Ara Pacis.30
Originally, David painted Pius VII seated to Napoleon’s right by other ecclesiastics with his hands folded in his lap. Explaining that he hadn’t brought the pope all the way from the Vatican to sit and do nothing, Napoleon had David portray the pontiff blessing the coronation with his right hand. To give Napoleon and Joséphine more importance, David also downsized Notre Dame. In addition to Napoleon’s changes, David himself took artistic license. Behind Napoleon, he inserted another military general who seized power with a coup—Julius Caesar in ecclesiastic robes.
David spent much of 1806 painting the participants’ portraits and opulent costumes. Like Rubens in the Medici cycle, David organized some 230 figures into groups. Napoleon’s siblings appear on the left. The dignitaries of the Empire are shown in the right foreground in three-quarter back view, holding the eagle-topped scepter, globe, and hand of Justice. Joséphine, painted to look younger than her forty years, kneels by Joachim Murat who holds the coronation cushion.31 The crossbearer’s cross reaches up to the second level of the tribune where David stands sketching with his wife, twin daughters, and several friends.
Three years after the coronation, on January 4, 1808, Napoleon visited David’s studio, spending an hour studying the Sacre. Measuring nearly thirty-three feet wide and just over twenty feet tall, the giant canvas entranced the emperor who drew his hat in salute to David.32 “How grand! How all the objects project! It is so beautiful! What truth! This is not a painting; one walks in this picture!”33
In February and March, the Sacre was the hit of the Musée Napoléon’s annual Salon. Despite its acclaim, David’s relationship with Napoleon and his courtiers remained prickly. In 1806, Denon gave David, along with other painters, their marching orders. They had twenty-four hours to pack up their studios in the Musée Napoléon’s Cour Carrée. Due to a rift over money, the remaining two paintings in the coronation cycle were never completed.
David’s second canvas, The Distribution of the Eagle Standards at Champs de Mars, proved far less of a critical success than the Sacre. David captured the impressive military event in an enormous canvas for the Tuileries throne room. He portrayed Napoleon like a Roman emperor distributing eagles to his soldiers. The Grande Armée’s military signs and symbols were directly modeled on Roman models.34
David also painted Pius VII’s portrait. But the December sitting at the Tuileries almost didn’t happen. The sixty-three-year-old was hesitant to pose for a man “who had killed his King and who would make short work of a poor papier-mâché Pope.”35 David portrayed the pontiff seated in a three-quarter-length pose, wearing an ermine-trimmed red velvet cape over a white tunic, and a red stole with gold embroidery. In his right hand, the sitter holds a piece of paper with the Latin Pio VII bonarum artrium patrono, Pius VII Patron of the Fine Arts.
“He was beautiful to see;” wrote David. “He reminded me of Julius II, whom Raphael painted in the Heliodorus of the Vatican.”36 To this he added, in February 1805: “This good old man, what a venerable figure! How simple he is . . . and what a fine head he has! A truly Italian head; the large eyes set so well, very pronounced! . . . He’s a true Pope, that one! Poor, humble; he’s only a priest.”37
FOUR
KING OF ITALY
In agreeing to officiate at Napoleon’s coronation in Paris, Pope Pius VII hoped to reset their relationship. His goal was to secure the return of Romagna, Ferrara, and Bologna, formerly part of the Papal States. He also wanted the Catholic Church to be named France’s state religion. But the pope returned to Rome on May 17, 1805, empty-handed, still smarting from the symbolic insult of Napoleon placing the crown on his own head.
Not only were the three territories not returned, France’s new emperor was about to turn the former Cisalpine and Italian Republics into the Kingdom of Italy, with himself as king.1 So when Napoleon asked Pius to accompany him to Milan for the royal coronation, he passed, delegating the role to his Paris legate, Cardinal Caprara, archbishop of Milan.
Originally, Napoleon tapped his brother Joseph Bonaparte for the job. By late January 1805, Joseph reneged on the agreement, choosing instead to retain his succession rights to the French imperial throne. On March 31, Napoleon’s entourage left Paris for a week of receptions in Lyon. From there, they crossed the Mont Cenis Pass on mules, arriving in Turin by April 24 where they ran into Pius on his way back to Rome.
By early May, a bust of Napoleon was ordered for the façade of the Malatestiana Library in Cesena, along with an Egyptian pyramid and a triumphal arch based on the Arch of Septimius Severus for Mantua. A new road outside Verona was to be named Strada Bonaparte. On May 8, Napoleon made a triumphal entry into Milan through the city’s medieval gate, Porta Ticinese, renamed Marengo afte
r his victory in 1800. The welcome included French and Italian troops, spectators, and cannon fire. As general of the Army of Italy, Napoleon had addressed his victorious troops from the very same spot on May 15, 1796:
“Soldiers, You have rushed like a torrent from the top of the Apennines; you have overthrown and scattered all that opposed your march. Piedmont, delivered from Austrian tyranny, indulges her natural sentiments of peace and friendship toward France. Milan is yours, and the Republican flag waves throughout Lombardy . . . we are the friends of the people everywhere, and those great men whom we have taken for our models. To restore the capitol, to replace the statues of the heroes who rendered it illustrious, to rouse the Roman people, stupefied by several ages of slavery—such will be the fruit of our victories; they will form an era for posterity, you will have the immortal glory of changing the face of the finest part of Europe. . . . The French people, free and respected by the whole world, will give to Europe a glorious peace, which will indemnify them for the sacrifices of every kind which for last six years they have been making. You will then return to your homes and your country. Men will say, as they point you out, “He belonged to the army of Italy.”2
Now as emperor, Napoleon and his retinue checked into Monza Palace, conveniently located across from his coronation venue, the pink-hued marble Duomo. Accommodating some forty thousand, the monumental cathedral competed in scale with Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica and Seville’s Cathedral. But its two thousand exterior statues and 135 delicately carved towers were unrivaled. Since 1762, the highest spire had been topped with Madonnina, a towering copper and gold leaf statue of the Virgin Mary by Giuseppe Perego.
Begun in the fourteenth century, Milan’s Duomo was built by thousands of European artists, sculptors, and artisans. Canals were dredged and a new road built to haul marble for the cathedral from quarries near Lake Maggiore. But after its consecration in 1418, the Duomo remained unfinished for centuries due to a shortage of funds and stylistic disagreements. As a young general in 1797, Napoleon tried to win over the Milanese by completing the façade. Now one week before his coronation, Napoleon again ordered the façade to be completed in the neoclassical style by Carlo Pellicani. The centuries-old project was finally realized in 1813 with Napoleon’s statue capping one of the spires.