The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

  Before announcing Trajan’s death, his childless widow Plotina adopted her beloved Hadrian as heir. Trajan’s Column became a tomb. A small door on the entrance side of the column’s base led to a chamber where Trajan’s cremated ashes were deposited in a golden urn. In 121, Emperor Hadrian added a second urn with Plotina’s ashes to the cella, or burial chamber. Debate continues over whether Trajan’s Column was originally intended as an honorary or a funerary monument.

  The sculpted surface of Trajan’s Column was probably painted in bright colors and the soldiers armed with small metal spears and swords. As part of the propaganda to deify Trajan, a colossal gilded bronze statue of the emperor was installed on top. This wasn’t a new practice. According to Filippo Coarelli, the use of freestanding columns as the bases for divine or honorary statues was an ancient tradition, probably originating in Greece.11 A century before, Pliny wrote that this tradition elevated mortals to an exulted status.

  Apollodorus flanked the column with Greek and Latin libraries. Square-shaped with vaulted roofs, the two buildings sported second story balconies for bird’s-eye views of the marble reliefs. Furnished with statuary and reading tables, the libraries’ holdings included Latin and Greek versions of Trajan’s military dispatches, recorded on illustrated scrolls. Trajan’s own written commentaries may have inspired the scenes for his unprecedented marble frieze. “The two hundred meter long spiral frieze can be seen as a scroll unfurled from bottom to top,” writes Diana Kleiner.12

  Numerous images of Trajan turned his Forum into what James Packer calls “a biography in stone which successively revealed the various stages in the life of its hero as he progressed from mortality to deification.”13 As Packer writes, “The expensive imported marbles and the standards and statues of gilded bronze that crowned the surrounding buildings were the unmistakable signs of an overwhelming imperial prosperity and achievement.”14

  Apollodorus’s novel idea of a column decorated with a spiral frieze was copied by Marcus Aurelius in Rome and Theodosius and Arcadius in Constantinople. Around 608, a forty-five-foot-tall Corinthian column dedicated to Byzantine Emperor Phocas was erected in the Roman Forum, the last such column. Almost 250 years after its debut, Trajan’s Forum was still inspiring awe among visitors to Rome, including Emperor Constantius II, son of Constantine the Great. “. . . when Constantius II reached the Forum of Trajan [357 C.E.], a complex unique in the world, and in our judgment, worthy the admiration of the gods, he stopped amazed, considering all around him those gigantic structures, which words cannot describe or mortal hands again build,” wrote Ammianus Marcellinus.15

  After Trajan’s death, in the early years of Hadrian’s reign, Apollodorus continued as master architect, possibly designing the Pantheon. The brilliant engineer is credited with many projects in and around Rome, including the harbor at Portus, Ostia, the port at Civitavecchia, and the arches at Ancona and Benevento. Built between 114 and 118, the Arch at Benevento between Rome and Naples honored Trajan with relief panels covering his greatest achievements. Hadrian would finish the arch, adding himself to scenes with Trajan.

  Apollodorus was working on a statue to the moon for Hadrian, intended to match Nero’s one-hundred-foot-tall Colossus. But he never finished the project. Apollodorus made the fatal mistake of insulting Hadrian’s own dome design for Tivoli. “Be off, and draw your gourds [vaults],” he told Hadrian condescendingly. “You don’t understand anything of these matters.”16 In 117 C.E., Hadrian banished Apollodorus from Rome and proceeded to fill his villa with the maligned vaults. According to Dio Cassius, the exiled Apollodorus was charged with trumped-up crimes and executed in 130. The renowned engineer was somewhere between sixty and seventy years old at his death.

  The statue of Trajan atop his column was melted down in Christian times. From surviving coins, it seems possible that the figure may have been a heroic nude topped by an eagle.17 The gold urns containing the ashes of Trajan and Plotina were looted in the Middle Ages. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V replaced the missing statue of Trajan with one of St. Peter by Bastiano Torrigiano. (Sixtus also topped the Marcus Aurelius column with a statue of St. Paul). The pope explained that a monument like Trajan’s could become worthy to bear the effigy of Christ’s Vicar on Earth only if it was rededicated in the cause of the Catholic Church. Sixtus also removed marble from the façade of Septimius Severus’s Septizodium for his own building projects.18

  The richly decorated Trajan’s Column continued to be a source of artistic inspiration. In the early eleventh century, Saint Bernard, bishop of Hildesheim, copied Trajan’s Column with a bronze column for the Church of St. Michael’s featuring a spiral frieze of Christ’s life crowned with a triumphal cross. Starting in the 1500s, plaster casts of the column’s extraordinary friezes were commissioned by France’s François I followed by Louis XIV. In 1595, Henri IV built a replica of Trajan’s Column by the Petit Palais. Ten scrolled bands were engraved with key events from his own rule. The column, writes Margaret McGowan, helped Henri IV strengthen his authority and foster acceptance for his new Bourbon dynasty.19 In the eighteenth century, Vienna’s Church of St. Charles Borromeo added two Trajan-like columns to its façade depicting the life of St. Charles, a sixteenth-century Italian bishop who ministered to plague victims.

  Michelangelo reportedly said that if the Lombards could draw, no one would pay attention to his or anyone else’s work; only in Rome was there a Trajan’s Column. While visiting Paris in 1665, his famous successor Gian Lorenzo Bernini noted that Trajan’s Column was the training school for Renaissance greats Raphael and Giulio Romano.20 Throughout the centuries, the column remained a powerful symbol of military victory. As other iconic Roman monuments crumbled, Trajan’s Column survived. As Robert Hughes puts it, Trajan’s Column is “bar none, the greatest piece of narrative sculpture from the ancient world.”21

  Napoleon was wrapping up his victory over Russia and Austria when the Gregorian calendar went into effect on January 1, 1806, throughout the French Empire. The Republican calendar implemented in 1792 had started over with Year I, giving poetic names to the months. Napoleon’s coup d’état on November 9, 1799, for example was known as the coup of 18 Brumaire, Year VIII from the French word brume, or mist. Days were divided into ten hours of one hundred minutes each; months into three ten-day weeks with five days (six in a leap year) added at year end.

  Napoleon’s Concordat with Pius restored the Gregorian calendar days of the week and made Sunday the official day of rest, but left the months and years of the Republican calendar. With its three ten-day weeks per month, the calendar was unsustainable. It was also getting increasingly difficult to synch the calendar with Napoleon’s growing Empire. In ordering the replacement of the Republican calendar, Napoleon further disassociated himself from the Revolution.

  Ancient Rome also changed the way time was measured. After being named Pontifex Maximus in 63 B.C.E., Julius Caesar introduced major calendar reforms with the help of the Greek astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria. Among the changes aimed at synching the monthly and yearly calendars was the first leap year, created by adding an extra day to February every fourth year.22

  Augustus continued to manipulate Rome’s calendar. These included the introduction of numerals to the fasti consulares (lists indicating the year) to indicate the number of years elapsed since Rome’s founding. To the religious calendar, Augustus added festival days commemorating imperial events.23 “After centuries in which no human being was named on the calendar,” writes Denis Feeney, “the imperial family is now everywhere, with specific year dates often attached to their various doings.”24

  By late January, Napoleon was back in Paris, eager to give his capital a fitting monument to the Grande Armée’s victory at Austerlitz. As his private secretary Bourrienne observed, Napoleon’s “passion for monuments almost equaled his passion for war. The destruction of men and the construction of monuments were two things perfectly in unison in the mind of Bonaparte.”25

  Napoleon actually considered
dismantling and moving Trajan’s Column to Paris, all 1,100 tons of it. Fortunately his advisors dissuaded him, arguing against the spoliation of one of ancient Rome’s greatest architectural achievements. Instead, Vivant Denon suggested a new column for the Vendôme Square dedicated to the Grande Armée’s recent victories, modeled after the celebrated Trajan’s Column.

  For Napoleon, Trajan was a worthy role model. During his nearly two-decade rule, from 98 until 117 C.E., the skilled general and emperor expanded the Roman Empire to its greatest size; his military exploits equaled or exceeded those of Alexander the Great. Modeling his own column after that of Trajan underscored the parallels between the victories of his Grande Armée and the Roman legions. “Such a noble and classical the monument would attest to a French Empire equal to that of the ancient Romans under the leadership of an emperor equal to the greatest of Rome’s rulers,” writes Charles Mack. It would be “symbolic of Paris’s position as the new Rome of Europe and point to the fulfillment of the nation’s dreams of achieving a continental hegemony . . . an ambition which extended back . . . to Charlemagne himself.”26

  In a bulletin to his soldiers, Napoleon described Trajan’s famous bridge built by Apollodorus during the second Dacian war. “In Hungary it diminishes a great deal; and at the place where Trajan raised a bridge it is almost unnoticeable. There, the Danube is 450 toises broad; here it is only 400. The bridge of Trajan was a stone bridge, the work of several years. Caesar’s bridge over the Rhine was raised, it is true, in eight days, but no loaded carriage could pass over it.”27

  In addition to disbursing spoils of war to their officers, troops, and themselves, Roman generals felt a moral obligation to spend a large part of booty on the public for temples, basilicas, and aqueducts. “The decision to build something spectacular carried the greatest prestige and won the most acclaim,” writes W. Jeffrey Tatum. “. . . Roman public building was dynastic.”28

  As first consul, Napoleon wanted to build Roman-style triumphal columns. At his direction in 1800, the French Assembly issued two decrees for a “column dedicated to the [Revolutionary] heroes” of each administrative department in France to be installed in each major city. Two were to be built in Paris. One of these, dedicated to revolutionary heroes, was earmarked for the Place de la Concorde; the second, honoring heroes of the Department de la Seine, was to be erected in the Place Vendôme north of the Tuileries Gardens. Jacques-Louis David, Charles Percier, and Pierre Fontaine judged the submissions for the Place Vendôme column.

  Built in the late seventeenth century by Jules Hardouin-Mansart to honor Louis XIV, the Place Vendôme took its name from the residence of Henri IV’s son, the Duc of Vendôme. Mansart razed the residence to make room for his new square. For over a century, the Place Vendôme was dominated by François Girardon’s monumental equestrian statue of Louis XIV wearing the cloak of a Roman emperor and a large curly wig. The statue was toppled by revolutionaries in 1792.

  The statue’s thirty-foot-deep foundation was still intact on Bastille Day, 1800, when Lucien Bonaparte, then interior minister, laid the foundation stone for the new column. But the ambitious plan was never realized, probably due to budget constraints. Three years later, Napoleon tried again, this time scaling back the project. On October 1803, he proposed building one national column in the Place Vendôme “equaling that in Rome set up in honor of Trajan.”29 Like its ancient prototype, the proposed column was to be decorated with frieze panels in an upward spiral containing over one hundred figures symbolic of the various departmental units in France. Napoleon also proposed that this column be capped with a statue of Charlemagne.

  According to Valérie Huet, Napoleon chose Trajan’s Column as his model because of his “fascination for Rome, its power and its strategies of display in art . . .”30 “Napoleon was the true reincaration of a Roman emperor,” adds Huet. The column in the Place Vendôme “expressed Napoleon’s triumph, celebrating his Grande Armée just as Trajan’s column had commemorated the victories of Trajan and of his Roman soldiers . . .”31

  After the National Assembly ratified the proposal, Denon tapped architects Jacques Gondouin and Jean-Baptiste Lepère for the high-profile commission. Gondouin, the son of a royal gardener and student of Jacques-François Blondel, had studied at the French Academy of Rome as a recipient of the second Grand Prix. After his position as Louis XV’s Furniture Designer to the Crown, Gondouin survived the Revolution by posing as a gardener at his country house. Lepère, who Denon knew from the Egyptian campaign, designed propagandistic medals for Napoleon. In 1802, he succeeded Percier and Fontaine at Malmaison.

  Gondouin and Lepère conceived a core cylinder twelve feet in diameter made of ninety-eight hollow stone drums. This stone column was to be covered by 425 spiraling plaques depicting France’s recent military victories. While the frieze of Trajan’s Column was carved from marble, the Vendôme Column reliefs were to be made of plates of cast bronze, fixed by hooks to the column. Three-feet-eight-inches high and 722-feet long, the frieze would cover the column’s shaft in twenty-two upward spirals.32

  In a highly symbolic gesture, the bronze for the plates was to come from melting down some 130 Austrian and Russian cannons captured at Austerlitz and other battles in 1805.33 Two years later, this practice would be repeated for a bronze statue of General Desaix, whom Napoleon called his Hephaestion, best friend of Alexander the Great. For Hephaestion’s cremation in Babylon in 323 B.C.E., Alexander heaped gold, jewels, ivory, and spices onto the pyre. To supply the bronze for Desaix’s statue in the Place des Victoires, captured mortars were melted down from the Prussian campaign.34 According to Frances Steiner, Napoleon was fascinated with the idea of incorporating the spoils of war into his buildings, part of his desire to “associate symbolically his new public monuments with his military exploits.”35

  Napoleon’s use of enemy weapons for sculpture revived a tradition dating back to antiquity. In his encyclopedic bestseller Natural History, Pliny the Elder wrote that the Greeks cast bronze statues of both gods and mortal heroes. Roman quaestor Spurius Carvilius made a devotional bronze statue using the breastplates, greaves, and helmets of the defeated Samnites. After Octavian’s admiral Agrippa defeated Sextus in 36 B.C.E., the future emperor had a column erected in the Forum decorated with prows from enemy ships.36 Repurposing enemy weapons continued in the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century for example, Giambologna cast his Equestrian Monument to Henri IV with enemy artillery from Livorno.37

  To design the column’s reliefs, Denon hired Bordeaux-born painter and lithographer Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, a student of David, along with two assistants, François Mazois and Benjamin Zix. Trained as an architect, Mazois was an expert on the monuments of Roman Gaul. As official artist of the Napoleonic campaigns, Strasbourg-born Benjamin Zix would travel with Denon to Prussia, Poland, Spain, and Italy.

  Napoleon personally selected the events to be represented. Like Roman emperor Trajan, Napoleon plays a starring role in the reliefs. Bergeret, Mazois, and Zix produced drawings for seventy-six episodes from the Grande Armée’s recent campaign in southern Germany and Austria. Starting from the military camp at Boulogne, the vignettes continued with the army’s departure, various battle scenes, and finally the Treaty of Pressburg and Napoleon’s triumphant return to Paris on January 26, 1806.

  A team of sculptors executed Bergeret’s designs in bronze at the foundry of Jean-Baptiste Launay and Bonon. Among them were François Joseph Bosio, François Rude, Jean-Joseph Foucou, Louis-Simon Boizot, Lorenzo Bartolini, Claude Ramey, Charles-Louis Corbet, Clodion, and Henri-Joseph Ruxthiel. Julie Charpentier was the only woman on the project.38

  The Vendôme Column rests on a twenty-two-foot-tall pedestal made of Corsican granite blocks covered in cast bronze. Like Trajan’s Column, the pedestal was decorated with war motifs, in this case enemy cannons, uniforms, helmets, and flags after drawings by Mazois and Dix. On the south side of the pedestal above the doorway, a panel supported by winged Victories bore a Latin inscription: �
�The august Emperor Napoleon set up this monument of the German War and dedicated it to the glory of his greatest army; it is made out of bronze captured from the Germans routed by his leadership in the space of three months in 1805.”39

  Like Trajan’s Column, an inside staircase of 176 steps winds up the hollow interior to a square viewing platform, the abacus of the Doric capital.40 Also like Trajan’s Column, the Vendôme Column was topped with a bronze statue of the emperor. Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s elegant Hellenistic style was influenced by Antonio Canova whose works he had admired as a pensioner at the French Academy in Rome in the mid-1780s. A decorative sculptor, Chaudet had also designed reliefs for Joséphine’s jewelry cabinet and the eagle on top of the standards of the imperial army. After the proclamation of the Empire, Chaudet received exclusive rights to reproduce in plaster his portrait bust of Napoleon. In January 1805, Chaudet’s statue Napoleon the Legislator was installed in the rooms of the Legislative Corps.

  Chaudet portrayed Napoleon as a Caesar, wearing a toga, his bare head crowned with a laurel wreath. In his left hand, the emperor held an orb topped by a winged Victory; his right hand rested on the pommel of a spatha, the three-foot long battle sword used by the Romans.

  Napoleon carried his own favorite sword at Austerlitz. Created by Biennais, the solid gold hilt was chased and embossed with scrolling foliage and featured the emperor’s portrait in profile. After applying a blend of mercury and gold paste, Biennais drove the mercury away, creating highly toxic fumes along with the spectacular gold decoration. By heating the blade to between 545 and 563 degrees Fahrenheit, Biennais imparted a spectacular blue finish to the metal. Napoleon dubbed the weapon “my sword.” Like the spatha-wielding Romans, Napoleon must have felt invincible.