by Susan Jaques
Nepotism was alive and well in the Roman Empire. In fact, the word came from the Latin word nepos, meaning grandson or descendant, evolving over time to signify nephew. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the term nepotism described the standard practice of popes and the French nobility naming their “nephews” (often their illegitimate children) as cardinal nephews, prelates, and other elite positions.
To guarantee themselves allies, France’s Bourbon kings placed members of their family on the thrones of Spain and Naples. Napoleon extended this tactic beyond Spain and Naples, establishing what he called a “system” of family appointments. In 1805, after launching the Kingdom of Italy with his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais as viceroy, Napoleon told diplomat François Miot de Mélito, “I am making a family of Kings or rather of Viceroys.” In addition to his stepson, Napoleon elevated five of his seven siblings: Joseph as king of Naples and later Spain, Louis as king of Holland, Jérôme as king of Westphalia, Elisa as grand duchess of Tuscany, and Caroline and Joachim Murat as queen and king of Naples.
Though Napoleon brought his clan great wealth and prestige, his largesse came with strings attached. The Bonaparte siblings were expected to be puppet rulers. Napoleon’s demand that his family members be extensions of him weakened their effectiveness, explains Philip Dwyer.4 Independent thinking was not tolerated, as Elisa soon learned. After complaining about an order by French officials, she received this alarming letter from her brother:
“You have the right to appeal to me against my Minister’s decisions, but you have no right to hinder their execution in any way. The Ministers speak in my name. No one has any right to paralyse, or stop the execution, of the orders they transmit. . . . You are a subject, and, like every other French subject, you are obliged to obey the orders of the Ministers—for a writ of Habeas Corpus, issued by the Minister of Police, would fully suffice to arrest you.”5
Napoleon shared power until he was challenged. About Joseph’s ambition to be named heir to the throne in 1804, Napoleon told civil servant Pierre Louis Roederer: “Nothing can wipe this from my memory. It was as if he [Joseph] had told a passionate lover that he had slept with his mistress, or at least that he had hopes of doing so. . . . Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me or even covet her.”6 When Louis Bonaparte tried to create Dutch marshals, Napoleon overruled him, arguing that satellite kingdoms could not have this prerogative.7
The purpose of Napoleon’s family-run satellites was to achieve, like the Romans, a pan-European empire. As he explained: “One of my first grand ideas was the consolidation, the concentration of the same geographic peoples who were dispersed and fragmented by revolutions and politics. In Europe there are thirty million French, fifteen million Spaniards, fifteen million Italians, thirty million Germans, and twenty million Poles; I want to make of each one nation.”8 Toward this end, satellite kingdoms across continental Europe were governed under the Napoleonic Code.
In Napoleon’s quest for European hegemony, matchmaking continued to be a tactic, helping strengthen France’s strategic positions across the continent. Roman generals and emperors almost exclusively arranged marriages for strategic dynastic and political purposes. The strategy had mixed results. In 59 B.C.E. for example, Julius Caesar married off his beloved teenage daughter Julia to forty-four-year-old Pompey, thirty years her senior, to seal a political alliance, the First Triumvirate. Five years later, while her father was in Britain, Julia died in childbirth along with her baby (Julia’s mother had also died in childbirth). The alliance fell apart after Julia’s death, leading to civil war.
In 178, Marcus Aurelius arranged for his sixteen-year-old son and co-ruler Commodus to marry Crispina. Hailing from a wealthy, illustrious family, the new empress was the daughter of a consul and granddaughter of an heiress and a consul/senator. A decade into their marriage when Crispina hadn’t produced an heir, Commodus accused her of adultery and exiled her to Capri where she was executed. Several years later, Commodus was strangled in his bath, ending the Nerva-Antonine dynasty.
As in imperial Rome, Napoleon’s political unions were largely failures. In 1802, his brother Louis, who suffered from poor mental health, wed Joséphine’s daughter Hortense. After a miserable marriage, they separated in 1810. In August 1803, less than a year after his sister Pauline’s first husband General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc died of yellow fever in Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti), Napoleon married off the twenty-three-year-old widow. The groom was Camillo Borghese, uber-wealthy scion of the aristocratic Roman family. Napoleon saw the union as a way to legitimize his claim to the Kingdom of Italy. About the unhappy match, Pauline said that she would have preferred to remain a widow than “be married to a eunuch.”9
In January 1806, two days after being adopted by Napoleon, Joséphine’s son Eugène married Princess Amalia of Bavaria, eldest daughter of his stepfather’s ally in the Confederation of the Rhine, King Maximilian I. In April 1806, Napoleon further secured the alliance by arranging for Joséphine’s niece, Stéphanie de Beauharnais to wed the crown prince of Baden, another Confederation member. Jérôme succumbed to pressure from his brother, divorcing his pregnant American wife and marrying Catherine of Wurttemberg. In 1807, he became king of newly created Westphalia.
The Bonaparte siblings brought their own households with them, and added preeminent local nobles to their satellite courts. They refurnished the interiors of their numerous palaces in the Empire style, helping spread the aesthetics and symbols of Napoleonic France throughout Europe. In addition, they copied the etiquette and lavish costumes of their brother’s court for their own.10
In Milan, Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of the Kingdom of Italy, established a household administered by French and Italian grand officers and an intendant. Among the duties of his household was running and decorating palaces in Milan, Parma, and Venice with French- and Italian-made furnishings.11 The vice-regal couple first moved into the Royal Palace. They would soon occupy the Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte, along with the Villa Pisani at Stra, and the Villa Reale in Monza.
In January 1807, Napoleon bought the Villa Pisani near Padua for Eugène. Ridden with gambling debts, the Venetian patrician family sold their beautiful gardens and villa to the emperor for 1,901,000 Venetian liras. Built by Alvise Pisani, former ambassador to the court of Louis XIV, the late baroque villa boasted a beautiful garden and 114 rooms in honor of its owner who became Venice’s 114th doge in 1735. Eugène made a series of improvements, adding Empire-style rooms at the end of the façade facing the Brenta River.
Over the next five years, the Kingdom of Italy grew to include Venice, Dalmatia, the Papal territories of Macerata, Fermo, Urbino, Ancona, and the South Tyrol. Napoleon’s loyal stepson established a centralized state government with new legislative and administrative institutions. Eugène also undertook an ambitious plan to turn Milan into what Hugh Honour calls “the cynosure of Empire taste.”12 Handsome neoclassical gateways were erected around the city.
The area surrounding the Castello Sforzesco, used by the Austrians as a barracks, was transformed into an enormous circular piazza—home to the future Bonaparte Forum. Like the fora of ancient Rome, the Bonaparte Forum was to feature baths, a museum, Pantheon, theater, and customs house. Work began to the north on a triumphal arch, the Arco del Sempione, intended as the Forum’s entrance. A nearby arena was built in 1806 and 1807 with neoclassical gateways designed by Luigi Canonica. The largest arena since Roman times, it was used for chariot racing, mock sea battles, and other neoclassical entertainments.
Like ancient Rome, Napoleon “wanted the capital of his thirty departements to contain the richest store of treasures in the Empire,” writes Germain Bazin.13 In addition to a network of provincial museums created in France, galleries were established in several satellites including Milan. Eugène de Beauharnais dispatched commissioners to Venice, Bologna, Emilia, and the Veneto to select works from various depots containing art confiscated from suppress
ed churches and convents.14 The Pinacoteca di Brera became home to northern Italy’s most important works of art, including many altarpieces and other religious paintings. The gallery opened on Napoleon’s birthday, August 15, 1809. Andrea Appiani, a professor at the Brera Fine Arts academy established by Austrian empress Maria Theresa, was named curator.
Masterpieces of the Brera include Raphael’s Sposalizio or The Marriage of the Virgin (1504), acquired by the government of Milan for the museum. Originally from the Church of San Francesco in Città di Castello, the painting was inspired by an altarpiece of the same subject by Raphael’s teacher Pietro Perugino. Raphael placed his figures in a semicircle before a precisely painted temple, connecting all the elements by mathematical relations of proportion. The picture perfectly expresses Raphael’s view that artists had the duty of “making things not as Nature makes them, but as Nature should.”15
The Brera was also enriched with Eugène’s gift of two paintings. Piero della Francesca’s Madonna of Montefeltro (1472–74) originally graced Urbino’s Church of San Bernardino, built by Federico da Montefeltro for his tomb. Montefeltro is in fact part of Piero’s altarpiece, dressed as a military commander, kneeling in front of the sacred group. In 1811, Eugène donated Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà (1467–70), formerly in Bologna’s Sampieri collection.
In March 1806, Napoleon replaced Ferdinand and Maria Carolina with his brother Joseph as king of the Two Sicilies. Also that year, in recognition for Joachim Murat’s role in the German campaign, Napoleon rewarded his sister and brother-in-law with the Duchy of Berg and Cleves, created with territory seized from Prussia and Bavaria.
The seventh of the Bonaparte siblings, Caroline Murat was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, and schooled in Saint-Germain-en-Laye where she was classmates with her future sister-in-law, Hortense de Beauharnais. In Paris, she fell head over heels for dashing cavalry officer Joachim Murat who was recovering from an injury suffered during the Egypt campaign. In early 1800, the eighteen-year-old married Murat, fourteen years her senior.
The son of an innkeeper from the Lot region, Murat entered the army after a brief stint at the seminary in Toulouse. He earned a reputation as one of revolutionary France’s most daring soldiers. Impressed by Murat’s abilities during the 1795 royalist insurrection in Paris, Napoleon promoted him to aide-de-camp. During the battles at Austerlitz, Jena, Stettin, and Eylau, Murat became famous for his daring maneuvers and equestrian skills, along with his splendid uniforms. From Egypt to Russia, Murat participated in all of Napoleon’s major campaigns.
About his youngest sister, Napoleon remarked: “Of all my family, she’s the one that resembles me the most.” French foreign minister Talleyrand echoed this when he wrote: “Madame Murat had the head of Cromwell upon the shoulders of a well-shaped woman. Born with much grandeur of character, strong mind, and sublime ideas; possessing a subtle and delicate wit, together with amiability and grace, seductive beyond expression; she was deficient in nothing but in the art of concealing her desire to rule . . .”16
The Murats expressed their sophisticated taste at various residences: the Hôtel de Thélusson in Paris with its impressive rotunda by Ledoux, the Château de Villiers with Antonio Canova’s two statues of Cupid and Psyche, and the Élysée palace, which they bought in 1805. After renovating the palace with Empire-style furnishings, the Murats hosted balls, receptions, and parties, showing off their art collection featuring Italian Renaissance paintings by Fra Bartolomeo, Guido Reni, and Veronese. After the Murats’ departure for Naples, Joséphine had many of the pictures transferred to Malmaison.
While Murat had a series of affairs, Caroline took as lovers General Junot, her husband’s successor as governor of Paris, and Clemens von Metternich, Austria’s ambassador to France.17 In her memoirs, Madame de Rémusat summed up Caroline’s ambition and charm. “Her beauty was set off by the most exquisite dress; her pretensions were great; her manners affable when she thought it prudent, and more than affable to men whom she wished to fascinate. . . . [S]he endeavored to make friends among the influential members of the Government who might be useful to her. . . . She wanted to secure her present position, and especially to elevate her husband in spite of himself.”18
In 1808, the Murats succeeded Joseph Bonaparte in Naples when he was promoted to king of Spain. Like Joseph, the couple and their four children made Caserta their main residence. During his tenure, Bourbon Charles VII (future Charles III of Spain) had renovated the Royal Palace which had fallen into disrepair during the rule of the Habsburg’s viceroys. He preferred the country palaces and hunting grounds at Portici, Persano, and the Astroni.
As a symbol of his court, Charles decided to outdo Versailles with a spectacular new palace. Rome-trained architect Luigi Vanvitelli designed and supervised construction of the Reggia at Caserta. With the help of Luigi’s son Carlo Vanvitelli, Charles’s son Ferdinand continued the ambitious project (the palace was finally finished after the return of the Bourbons in 1815). The Reggia’s state apartments boasted “one of the most splendid flights of rooms in any royal palace in Europe,” writes Anthony Blunt, filled with classically inspired sculpture, paintings, and furnishings.19
Now it was the Murats’ turn. The fashionable power couple tried to out-dazzle the deposed Bourbons, recreating their posh Paris interiors with some of the state treasures from the Elysée Palace. For the royal palaces of Caserta, Capodimonte, and Portici, Caroline ordered Empire-style furniture—bronzes from Thomire, clocks from Breguet, and furnishings from Jacob-Desmalter. To redecorate her favorite residence, Portici, near Herculaneum, Caroline hired architect Étienne-Chérubin Leconte.20
A savvy collector, Caroline acquired a pair of Correggio paintings, the Ecce Homo and the Education of Love. Caroline also cultivated relationships with contemporary painters, notably Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Commissions from Ingres included the Betrothal of Raphael and Paolo and Francesca, along with the famous Grande Odalisque and its lost companion, the Sleeper of Naples. The lost picture was a pendant for a female nude that Joachim Murat had bought in 1808. Unable to complete the order on time, Ingres later sold the Grande Odalisque. Ingres would stay at the court of Naples from February to May 1814, when he visited Pompeii and painted Caroline’s portrait.
Caroline also tapped one of her brother’s favorite portraitists, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, to portray her family in numerous portraits, including her two sons and two daughters. She also commissioned works from landscape painters Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy, Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld, and Benjamin Rolland. Caroline recruited two Parisian artists to be her court painters—David student Élie-Honoré Montagny and Louis Nicolas Lemasle, who painted events of her reign and scenes of Naples.
The Murats also collected engraved gems, including those of Filippo Rega. After a decade in Rome where he studied with the celebrated engraver Giovanni Pichler, Rega returned to his native Naples where his clients included the Bourbons and Joseph Bonaparte (who made him a knight of Napoleon’s Legion of Honor). From 1804, Rega worked for the Naples Mint, which he would later direct. Like Pichler, Rega liked to sign his cameo portraits and engraved gemstones in Greek letters, adding to their aura of antiquity.21
The Murats’ ambitious urban renewal projects included construction of the Piazza del Plebiscito and the Corso Napoleone, restoration of the Academy of Drawing, and creation of a museum of natural history. But their most important accomplishment was resuming archaeological excavations at Pompeii begun by Charles and Ferdinand. For the first time, the archeological sites were open to the public, attracting foreign artists and architects.22
Among the frequent visitors to Pompeii was French architect François Mazois, recruited by Joachim Murat. Like his teacher Charles Percier, Mazois traveled to Rome to study the city’s ancient monuments in 1808. During his restoration of the palace of Portici, Mazois became smitten with Pompeii. Caroline Murat gave him access to the site, closely guarded by the Naples Academy, and an allowance of one thousand francs a month. The r
esult was Mazois’s Les Ruines de Pompéi dessinées et mesurées pendant les années 1809, 1810, 1811, featuring measurements, descriptions, and drawings.23
New discoveries continued attracting artists. French antiquary Aubin-Louis Millin described the human tragedy along the Street of Tombs outside Pompeii: “A mother fled, dragging after her a part of her family: two daughters, and an infant whom she clutched in vain at her breast. There was no longer any hope; still gasping for breath in the midst of swirling clouds of burning cinders, and pressing against the walls of the portico, they fell exhausted by fatigue and suffering. The ash covered them, burying them all in the same tomb . . .” The finds were displayed at a public exhibition. In 1807, to protect Naple’s cultural patrimony, the Murats passed a law prohibiting the export of antiquities and fine arts.24 Louis Nicolas Lemasle would paint Joachim Murat’s portrait by the Villa of Diamedes in Pompeii.
Caroline, who had owned a collection of Etruscan vases at the Château de Villiers, became increasingly passionate about antiquities. “She [Caroline] took a great interest in the excavations going on there and the number of workmen doubled and trebled during her stay in Naples,” wrote Hortense de Beauharnais. “Many of the interesting objects dug up were used to form her own small museum” (the Queen’s Museum at the Royal Palace of Naples).25
Caroline often found herself caught in the middle between her uncompromising brother and her husband. But she proved more adept at ruling than her husband. Having secured the authority to succeed Joachim as regent, the clever Caroline ruled Naples ably when he left for the Russian campaign in 1812. For a short, fleeting moment, her vast ambition was realized. In Chariot of Aurora, one of the last works by the porcelain factory Real fabbrica della porcellana di Napoli, Aurora leads a dozen dancers, the Hours, and two small putti. Caroline Murat sits on a chariot of the sun in place of Apollo.26