by Susan Jaques
Napoleon visited Sèvres once a year, often showing up unannounced with Joséphine and several ladies of her court. Sometimes Joséphine visited by herself, appropriating objects. Napoleon enjoyed showing off the factory to visiting sovereigns and dignitaries. On January 4, 1805, Brongniart sent the mayor of Sèvres a list of invitees for a visit by Pius VII. Napoleon instituted New Year’s gifts, a chance to show off the artistry of Sèvres. The presents were given to foreign sovereigns and members of the imperial family, along with senior officials. Sèvres produced a wide variety of decorated dishes, toilet articles, and inkwells for the numerous imperial residences. Table services, clocks, plaques, and candelabra required the collaboration of different craftsmen.
Napoleon continued to offer suggestions. In 1806, he instructed Sèvres to: “Place on the services . . . views of the Adige, of Venice, of Genoa, and of the realm of Italy, more interesting and more historical than those to be found elsewhere.”23 For diplomatic gifts, the Emperor directed Sèvres to “use portraits, views of Paris and of different imperial palaces,” and “finally, replace all the figures of nude women and insignificant landscapes . . . with things that are known and historical.” But Napoleon could be a demanding, impatient patron. On August 18, 1807, after someone in the imperial entourage complained about color flaws in the porcelain, he threatened to close the factory. The following year, when Brongniart was away from Sèvres, he was told that as a result of delays, Denon feared “that the Emperor might become angry and the results might be very unpleasant for everyone.”
Paris was still celebrating the victory of Austerlitz in April 1806 when Napoleon ordered a series of four guéridons or circular tables. Sèvres had produced some circular tables during Louis XVI’s reign, adorned with porcelain plaques. The recent development of hard-paste porcelain allowed the factory to produce larger plaques—over three feet in diameter. Napoleon’s admiration for Alexander the Great was expressed in the Table of the Great Commanders. The table combines some of the finest and most technically challenging work achieved by Sèvres in the early nineteenth century, writes Joanna Gwilt.24
The heads and scenes on the circular porcelain table top are painted to resemble antique cameos in sardonyx on a dark brown ground. The central medallion is a profile of Alexander the Great, with an unmistakable resemblance to Napoleon. Around Alexander’s head is a frieze in simulated relief painted in matte gold washed with brown, depicting three major events: his entry into Babylon; his reception by the Egyptian priests in the temple of Jupiter-Ammon; and his defeat of the Persians under Darius.
Surrounding Alexander are one dozen smaller profile heads of other commanders and philosophers from antiquity, along with scenes recalling key events from their lives. Clockwise from the top, the figures are: Pericles, Scipio Africanus, Pompey, Augustus, Septimus Severus, Constantine, Trajan, Caesar, Mithridates, Hannibal, Themistocles, and Miltiades. The table took six years to finish at a cost of thirty thousand francs, a hefty increase from the original ten-month, nineteen-thousand-franc estimate.25
Napoleon also thought up the companion Table of the Marshals, also known as the Table of Austerlitz, with himself taking Alexander the Great’s place. Charles Percier provided drawings for the portrait of Napoleon standing in ceremonial costume surrounded by medallions of a dozen of his leading marshals and generals, along with martial virtues for the pedestal.
Though Brongniart warned Daru in July 1807 that Jean-Baptiste Isabey had never painted on porcelain before, the miniaturist was summonsed to Sèvres. Isabey painted Napoleon encircled by thirteen gold rays, each with the name of a victory. Between the rays are thirteen polychrome medallions with portraits of eleven marshals of the Empire and of two great court dignitaries. The gilded porcelain cylindrical pedestal featured biscuit relief figures representing the martial virtues. Thomire supplied the table’s rich bronze mounts.
Four years and 35,000 francs later, the Marshal’s Table was delivered to Napoleon at the Tuileries Palace where it was installed in the Empress’s apartment (November 18, 1810). The classically inspired table perfectly expressed Napoleon’s taste for the monumental and grandiose. “The epic of Napoleonic France represented with striking simplicity in the portraits of her most famous leaders. Another new and spectacular success for artists of Sèvres,” wrote Grandjean.26 Two years later, Napoleon loaned the Marshal’s Table to the Salon of 1812, where Isabey exhibited it under his own name.
Imperial glamour rubbed off on Napoleon’s family members whose Paris residences featured lavish décor. Caroline and Joachim Murat commissioned a shimmering silver salon at the Élysée Palace. Pauline Bonaparte’s boudoir at the Hôtel de Charost boasted a canopied bed framed by four Egyptian caryatids. Eugène de Beauharnais and his mother Joséphine spent vast sums transforming the Hôtel de Torcy into the luxurious Hôtel de Beauharnais (today’s German embassy) complete with a Turkish fantasy boudoir. The Hôtel de Beauharnais was irreconcilable with Napoleon’s frugal Corsican upbringing. Exasperated by the bills, he appropriated the property.
In a court noted for extravagance, Napoleon surprisingly kept a close eye on the purse strings. After reviewing a furnishings budget, he wrote: “I am returning approval of the budget for 1807. I have verified the figures myself and eliminated unnecessary expenditure. No money should be spent before I have approved the estimate either for decoration or for furnishing. Everything must be of the best, as if it were to last 100 years.”27
In addition to refurbishing the former royal châteaux, Napoleon continued to beautify Paris. From Saint-Cloud, he commissioned fifteen monumental fountains on May 2, 1806. Announcing that it was his wish “to do something grand and useful for Paris,” he decreed that the city’s new fountains would run twenty-four seven. “Starting next July 1, the water will flow in all the fountains of Paris day and night, so as to provide not only for the particular services and needs of the public, but also to refresh the atmosphere and wash the streets.”28
As Katia Frey notes, “The utilitarian aspect of the act was essential, for if the fountains contribute to the beautification of the city, they also made it possible to palliate a cruel shortage that its population had always suffered.”29 In the end, Napoleonic fountains totaled nearly thirty. Napoleon’s engineers built new fountains in the city’s major outdoor markets, and installed several hundred simple stone blocks with water taps. In 1812, Napoleon would make water from Paris’s fountains free.
Once again, Napoleon looked to Rome for his water program. According to Pliny, before leaving to defeat Antony and Cleopatra in Actium, Agrippa added hundreds of pools, water jets, and fountains. Inspired by Hellenistic fountains, Rome’s new fountains were often lavishly decorated with bronze and marble statues and marble columns.30 Houses and villas of wealthy Romans also featured small fountains. After visiting Rome around 164 C.E., the Greek doctor Galen wrote: “The beauty and number of Rome’s fountains is wonderful. None emits water that is foul, mineralized, turbid, hard, or cold.”31
Fed by its aqueduct network, Roman fountains came in many forms, including large flat vases of various sizes made from a single piece of hard stone like porphyry, granite, alabaster, and marble. “More than isolated monuments, they [fountains] are integral elements of Roman identity, linked together by hidden, subterranean conduits of metal, stone, and terra-cotta,” writes Katherine Rinne. “Each fountain is part of a hydrological system that includes the Tiber River, springs, streams, swamps, sewers, aqueducts, wells, conduits, cisterns, floors, and rainwater, all linked through topography.”32 Where an aqueduct entered the city, it was the ancient custom to build a nympheum, a large splendid fountain inscribed with the name of the sponsoring emperor. Many fountains were decorated with bronze or marble statues of divinities and marble columns. Often the water flowed out of bronze statues of boys, tritons, Nereids, and satyrs, and into basins.
The popes continued the fountain tradition, placing their names and insignia below the miter and crossed keys on the six great papal terminal
fountains—Trevi, Moses, Paul V, Naiads, Pincian Hill, and Piazzale degli Eroi. For added prestige, the popes also incorporated a half-dozen ancient Egyptian obelisks transported to Rome by a series of emperors. Sixtus V started the trend in the late sixteenth century with the Vatican obelisk (in front of St. Peter’s), the Lateran obelisk, and the obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo—on top of which he placed crosses. Relocating obelisks continued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the Piazza Navona (Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain, 1651) and Piazza del Pantheon (1711), along with the obelisk of Monte Cavallo placed between the statues of the Dioscuri by the Palazzo Quirinale (1786).33 Pius VII embellished his predecessor’s monument at the Quirinale, substituting an ancient basin for the Renaissance fountain.
Rome’s spectacular fountains distinguished the city from other European capitals. As the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: “The fountains of Rome are in themselves magnificent combinations of art, such as alone, it were worth coming to see.”34 Fountains with spectacular sculpture moved beyond their original functional purpose. During the summer, the drains of the Palazza Navona were plugged, filling the square with water as a refuge from the heat.
Napoleon’s early fountains were relatively modest in size, fed by a limited amount of water that poured through traditional spouts. One of the first to be completed, the Fontaine des Invalides at the esplanade of the Hôtel des Invalides, displayed one of Napoleon’s war trophies—Venice’s famous winged lion taken from St. Mark’s in 1797. Bearing inscriptions in Latin and French, a simple stone pedestal supporting the lion rose from a large circular basin. On each of the pedestal’s four sides, water spouted from small bronze lion heads modeled by Chaudet.
Many of the city’s fountains were designed by François-Jean Bralle, chief engineer of the water service for the City of Paris, who had worked on water pumps at Chaillot, Gros Caillou, and La Samaritaine. Among Bralle’s fountains were the Palm, Censier Street, Fellah, Pointe Saint-Eustache, Mars, and Leda. Two of the most dramatic were the Fellah Fountain on the rue de Sèvres and the Palm Fountain in the Place du Châtelet (both circa 1806).
With sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet, Bralle created the Fellah Fountain to commemorate Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. Fellah is Arabic for peasant or worker, associated with carrying water. Reflecting France’s craze for Egypt, the fountain evokes a portico from an Egyptian temple. In the trapezoidal niche stood a stone statue of Emperor Hadrian’s young lover Antinous, who was considered a model of antique male beauty. Wearing an Egyptian headdress and loincloth, the figure pours water from two pitchers into a basin. From there, the water flows to the grid from a lion’s mouth.
Beauvallet modeled Antinous after a famous statue at the Louvre, part of the art confiscated from Italy by Napoleon, originally at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. Bralle and Beauvallet may have also been inspired by artist Hubert Robert’s depiction of Rome’s Villa Albani where two statues of Antinous in niches frame the main pool. At the top of the monument, Bralle replaced the winged globe that usually adorned the tympanum of Egyptian temples with the symbol of the Empire—an imperial eagle with spread wings.
In 1806, Bralle and Beauvallet collaborated again on the Mars Fontaine on rue Saint-Dominique, inspired by the nearby L’Hôpital de la Garde du Gros-Caillou and Champs de Mars. One side of the fountain features a sculpture of Mars, Roman god of war, and Hygeia, goddess of health and daughter of the god of medicine. Beauvallet depicts Mars in antique style—helmeted, naked, and leaning on a large shield, though he did give the god of war a moustache. Beside him, Hygeia offers Mars a drink. The fountain’s other sides are decorated in high relief with large urns featuring Bacchic scenes. Below, allegorical marine animals adorn the corners of the pedestal.
In 1802, to improve traffic and access to the Île de la Cité, Napoleon ordered the demolition of the Grand Châtelet on the Seine. Gridlock in early nineteenth-century Paris was nothing new. The narrow streets of ancient Rome were effectively one-way, allowing just one wagon or chariot to pass at a time. Drivers sent a runner to hold up traffic at the other end of the street until the chariot had passed by. In 45 B.C.E., Julius Caesar tried to improve congestion in the city by banning carts, wagons, and chariots between sunrise and mid-afternoon. Goods could only be delivered to the shops of Trajan’s Market by wagon at night. As Kenneth D. Matthews writes: “. . . the late Republican and imperial governments considered the safety and unimpeded flow of pedestrian traffic a primary requirement in the effective protection of private and public life during the daytime.”35
Over the centuries the Grand Châtelet, a tweflth-century stone stronghold, had been repurposed as a prison and headquarters for Paris’s military police. Now the structure was replaced with the small square, the Place du Châtelet. Following proposals for an arch or column dedicated to Napoleon, the decision was made to construct a large fountain in the center of the new square. Modeled after a Roman triumphal column, the 1808 Fontaine du Palmier, or Palm Tree Fountain, took its name from its palm leaf/stalk decoration of its column and capital. The top of the seventy-foot-tall column was crowned with Louis-Simon Boizot’s gilt bronze figure of Victory holding a laurel wreath in each hand. A proxy for the emperor, she symbolized a dozen of Napoleon’s victories inscribed on bands in gold letters on the column—Arcole, Austerlitz, Danzig, Eylau, Friedland, Jena, Lodi, Morengo, Mont-Thabor, Pyramides, Rivoli, and Ulm.
Simon Boizot ringed the column’s square base with four female allegorical stone figures representing the cardinal virtues of Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Strength. Boizot also adorned the pedestal with bronze imperial eagles and dolphin heads, and water-spouting cornucopia.36 The dramatic monument ended up costing four times the estimate of fifteen thousand francs.37 After the Palm Fountain was moved some fifty feet in 1858 to accommodate changes to the place du Châtelet, architect Gabriel Davioud added the circular basins adorned with Henri Jacquemart’s four dramatic water-spewing sphinxes.38
The Leda Fountain, built in 1808, was originally built against the wall of a private garden at the corner of the rue de Vaugirard and rue du Regard (in 1864, it was moved to the back side of the Medici Fountain). Inspired by Renaissance sculpture, Achille Valois created an elegant bas-relief panel of Leda and the swan. While Cupid draws an arrow from his quiver, Leda plays with the swan spewing water from its beak into a basin. The bas-relief is raised on a pedestal, between two pilasters decorated with intertwined dolphins. The pediment originally featured a large eagle holding a laurel crown—symbol of the Napoleonic Empire.
Later fountains, including those designed by Girard, featured water as the main decorative element, shooting dramatically into the air and cascading into the basins. The Château-d’Eau (located in what was later renamed the Place de la Republique) was Paris’s first monumental fountain to feature two circular stone basins, one above the other on a column, with water overflowing the basins and falling into a larger circular basin below (this design had appeared on a smaller scale in Roman gardens and in Aix-en-Provence). In a nod to Egypt, eight Nubian lions spouted water into the lower basin.
Napoleon, like Julius Caesar, was consumed by warfare and spent little time in his capital. Despite this, the two energetic leaders succeeded in executing numerous civic improvements for Rome and Paris. Nearly two millennia later, Napoleon took his cues from the great Roman general and his successors—improving Paris’s water supply, beautifying the capital with fountains, and glorifying his Empire with monumental architecture and luxurious imperial palaces.
Like Julius Caesar, Napoleon would also grapple with governing his growing realm.
TWO
A FAMILY OF KINGS
Through continued military conquests, Rome’s emperors expanded the network of provinces. By the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Empire was a global superpower, with a population of some fifty million. In 212, Caracalla, the eldest son of Septimius Severus, extended Roman citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire. A cynical Cassius Dio r
emarked that rather than being honorable, Caracalla’s edict was intended to increase the number of taxpayers.
United by Roman rule and administration, the provinces were cash cows and food baskets supplying wheat, oil, and wine. Local industries also helped feed the Empire’s war machine. The iron works in Gaul and the Danubian basin, for example, produced weapons for Rome’s legions.
Local artistic traditions were encouraged—from glassmaking and mosaics to ceramics and textiles. In the third century, Rome-based writer Philostratus raved about the refined champlevé enamel of “barbarian” artists living in Gaul and Britain. Though each area retained its traditions, shared Roman art and architecture created a cultural unity across the Empire. As Jean Sorabella writes, early third-century Roman tourists would have felt right at home in the provinces whose cities boasted statues of the emperor and Roman baths, basilicas, and amphitheaters.1
The Roman Forum in the city center was the Republic’s political hub. In 46 B.C.E., Julius Caesar dedicated the Julian Forum nearby, financed with spoils from the Gallic wars (Caesar’s rival Pompey, meanwhile, built in the Campus Martius). Its temple was dedicated to Venus Genetrix, alluding to Caesar’s descent from the goddess. Four more imperial forums followed: the Forums of Augustus, Vespasian, Nerva, and Trajan. These Fora Imperatorum assumed cultural, administrative, legal, and cultural functions, and served as powerful propaganda for their eponymous emperors.2 The Forums were “the setting for the most important rite of legitimisation of the power of the emperors, with their deification after their death . . .” writes Marta Chiara Guerrieri.3