by Susan Jaques
In June 1806, Napoleon transformed the two-hundred-year-old Dutch republic into a monarchy and installed his brother Louis as king. Louis chose the prosperous city of Amsterdam instead of The Hague, Holland’s former administrative center, as his seat of power. For his palace, he appropriated the imposing Town Hall, centrally located in Dam Square by the Gothic Nieuwe Kerk (New Church). After ordering Amsterdam’s city council to vacate the seventeenth-century building, Louis hired architect Jean-Thomas Thibault, a friend of Percier and Fontaine, to supervise a complete makeover.
Money was no object for the one-million-plus-guilder project (roughly equivalent to seven million euros today).27 The finest decorators, cabinetmakers, and upholsterers from Amsterdam and The Hague went to work. The décor featured thousands of yards of sumptuous silk and satin and hundreds of chairs and tables in mahogany in the fashionable Empire style. The most expensive of the palace’s thirteen clocks sported a figurine of Napoleon as Julius Caesar.28
On April 20, 1808, Holland’s twenty-nine-year-old king traveled south from Utrecht to Amsterdam, where he received the keys to the city and passed through temporary triumphant arches. His state coach arrived at the new Dam Square Palace to a thirty-three-gun salute. Missing from the celebration were his estranged wife and son. In addition to the sumptuous Empire-style surroundings, Louis tried emulating the protocol of his brother’s court in Paris. A copy of Ségur’s detailed Etiquette was found in the palace library. Throughout the book, Louis had crossed out the words “imperial” and replaced them with “royal.”29
Toward the back of the palace on the second floor, Louis formed a Royal Museum with works previously owned by the House of Orange, the city of Amsterdam, private collectors, and the National Gallery in The Hague (since 1800). (During the Directory in 1795, stadtholder William V’s art collection was taken from The Hague to Paris.) Now the city of Amsterdam was forced to relinquish seven large paintings to Louis including Rembrandt’s Night Watch and Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild and Bartholomeus van der Helst’s Celebration of the Peace of Munster. The Royal Museum opened on September 15, 1808, with an exhibition of Living Masters, largely historical paintings of the Netherlands. The museum’s first catalogue appeared the next year with some 459 paintings. The collection would form the nucleus of the Rijksmuseum in 1885.
Louis’s imperial household consisted of several hundred people, many of whom lived in the palace. Along with the impressive Grand Salon (the former Citizen’s Hall) and Throne Room on the first floor, the king’s apartment and queen’s apartment were located in diagonal opposite corners. When Hortense finally arrived in 1810, she could not have been more unhappy with her dark northwest suite. “My salon was once a courtroom in which criminals were brought to justice,” Hortense wrote. “It had a frieze of death’s heads in black and white marble. . . . The corridors were gloomy; the air was foul and the suffocating sulphorous vapours rising from the canal came wafting through my windows.”30 After a four-week stay, Hortense and Crown Prince Napoleon-Louis left and never returned.
Not satisfied with three former palaces of the House of Orange, Louis Bonaparte acquired Het Loo, several properties in Utrecht, and a pavilion in Haarlem. But he would not get to enjoy them much. Displeased by his brother’s reforms, Napoleon forced him out. In the summer of 1810, Louis abdicated in favor of his son. Napoleon overruled the succession and annexed Holland to the Empire. A month later, the royal palace at Dam Square officially became an imperial palace. Napoleon would stay there only once, in October 1811.
Frustrated by Portugal’s defiance of his European blockade against British trade, Napoleon ordered General Jerot to cross the Pyrenees and invade the country. The Portuguese offered no resistance; Prince Regent John of Braganza left for Brazil aboard the Portuguese fleet. By the end of November 1807, the French army closed Lisbon’s ports to English ships, bringing Britain into the Peninsular Wars.
The following March, Spain’s ineffective Charles IV abdicated in favor of his son Ferdinand VII. Two months later, at a conference in Bayonne, Napoleon forced both father and son to abdicate. He installed his reluctant brother Joseph Bonaparte to the Spanish throne. After an uprising that month in Madrid and the French defeat at Bailén in July, Joseph fled his new capital.
Spanish opposition to French rule surprised Napoleon. Rather than being seen as a liberator, he was staunchly opposed with revolts and guerilla warfare. By the fall 1808, Napoleon crossed the Pyrenees to deal personally with “the Spanish ulcer” and reestablish Joseph on the throne. By December, Napoleon entered Madrid and began reorganizing its administration. Napoleon was impressed with the Royal Palace, Palacio Nuevo. Built on the site of the Alcázar Royal, the Habsburg palace destroyed by fire in 1734, the vast royal residence had taken three decades to erect. Napoleon would return to Paris determined to update Versailles.
In addition to forming an art museum, Joseph built and refurbished Madrid’s public squares and boulevards, nicknamed “plazuelas,” or little plazas.31 In mid-1810, architect Silvestre Pérez, former pensionaire of the Saint Ferdinand Academy of Rome, proposed a transformative urban-development project. Several houses opposite the Royal Palace were razed to create a large space for a Forum Bonaparte, like the proposed forum in Milan.
A series of monumental plazas with columns and triumphal arches would link the palace to the Basilica of Saint Francis, repurposed as the National Assembly’s Chamber. With these plazas, writes Adrián Almoguera, Pérez intended to create “an architecturally symbolic union” between executive power represented by the palace and the legislative power of the people of Spain, represented by the former church. The ambitious plan also featured access routes to the Forum, including a triumphal arch as a grand entrance for the Avenue de Segovia.32
Denon accompanied Napoleon to Spain in 1808, looking for the finest art for the Musée Napoléon. Though the museum was now filled with pilfered masterworks from the Renaissance and Dutch and Flemish Baroque, Spain was not well represented. Long isolated from France, Spain’s art represented an exciting new school for the museum director. But Denon’s excitement quickly faded when he discovered that Joseph Bonaparte had beaten him to it.
In just months as Spain’s new king, Joseph consolidated some 1,500 artworks at the Prado from various royal castles and suppressed religious houses to form a national museum. Built by Charles VII in 1785 to house the Natural History Cabinet, the building was repurposed by his grandson Ferdinand VII as the Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures. On January 18, 1809, the disappointed Denon wrote a friend from Valladolid: “. . . twenty paintings of the Spanish school absolutely needed by the Musée . . . [which] would have been a trophy in perpetuity of this last campaign.”33
Denon urged Napoleon to suggest to Joseph that he donate a selection of paintings to the Musée Napoléon. To identify potential canvases, Denon formed a committee whose members included Charles’s IV’s former court painters Francisco Goya and Mariano Salvador Maella. The committee earmarked masterworks by Velazquez, Ribera, and Murillo, mainly from the Spanish royal collection.
But the Spaniards stalled. When the art finally arrived in Paris in 1813, Denon deemed just half a dozen of the fifty paintings museum worthy.34 In 1819, the restored Ferdinand VII opened the Museo del Prado to the public. Decades later, Francisco Goya’s powerful commemoration of Spanish resistance to Napoleon, The Third of May 1808, was taken out of storage.
THREE
VENUS VICTRIX
On April 24, 1808, Prince Camillo Borghese was welcomed to Turin by the city’s mayor and other officials. The crowds also turned out—not to see Piedmont’s new governor general, but to catch a glimpse of his glamorous spouse. A celebrity in her own right, Napoleon’s favorite sister Pauline Bonaparte Borghese was considered one of Europe’s most beautiful women.
When Napoleon dispatched the couple to Turin, Pauline was living in Nice apart from her husband. She initially refused to go, declaring the city ugly and boring. Pauline reportedly didn’t say
a word to Camillo throughout the trip. As their convoy entered Turin, Pauline looked out from her sedan. Her worst fears were confirmed—the former capital of Savoy and the kingdom of Sardinia reminded her of a military camp.1
By installing his sister and wealthy Italian brother-in-law in Turin, Napoleon hoped to win over Piedmont’s nobility and reduce tensions with the locals. Under French control since 1799 and annexed in 1802, Piedmont had been plagued by revolts and economic woes. The couple moved into the Palazzo Chiablese, part of the Royal Palace and former residence of Maurice and Luisa Cristina of Savoy. Like Napoleon’s other relatives, the Borgheses organized their own court, mainly consisting of the old Piedmont nobility.
For a short time, Pauline played along, attending parties, banquets, receptions, and horse races. But soon after their arrival in Turin, Pauline left Camillo and the Palazzo Chiablese for the Palazzina di Caccia, confiscated from the former king of Piedmont-Sardinia. Built in the early eighteenth century as a royal hunting lodge for Victor Amadeus II, king of Sardinia, the Palazzina was located at Stupinigi, about six miles southwest of Turin. The House of Savoy had used the residence for dynastic weddings, like that of Maria Teresa, princess of Savoy, to Louis XVI’s brother Charles Phillippe, the future Charles X of France. In April 1805, before his coronation as king of Italy in Milan, Napoleon went hunting in the park.
Pauline and Camillo Borghese had been living separate lives for some time. Pauline was only happy in Paris and spent much of her time at her chic Paris residence, the Hôtel de Charost in rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (today’s Hôtel Borghese). Though Pauline was not fond of her sister-in-law Joséphine, the two women shared a sophisticated sense of style and luxurious taste.
For her wedding, Pauline received three hundred thousand francs worth of jewelry. Among her most prized items was a spectacular diadem with Roman cameos set in a diamond frieze.2 In addition to a five hundred thousand-franc dowry, Napoleon gave Camillo the title prince of France and a 1,600-piece vermeil service by Parisian goldsmiths Odiot and Biennais with the Borghese family arms.3
A year into the marriage, tragedy struck. For an extended vacation in Tuscany, Camillo persuaded Pauline to leave Dermide, her six-year-old son with her first husband, in the care of his brother in Frascati. Napoleon had named his nephew after a hero in the epic poem, Ossian. During the vacation, Dermide fell ill with a fever and convulsions and died at the Villa Mondragone. Pauline never forgave Camillo and their shaky marriage fell apart.4
In 1806, Napoleon named Pauline the Princess and Duchess of Guastalla (Italy). Pauline proceeded to sell the duchy off to Parma for six million francs, retaining the princess title. Pauline’s eccentric behavior and love life became legendary. According to Anthony Majanlahti, she used her ladies-in-waiting as footstools and had her African footman carry her to her bath.5 Extramarital affairs with celebrities like violinist Niccolò Paganini, actor François-Joseph Talma, and writer Alexandre Dumas caused a scandal. In contrast to her infidelity, Pauline remained fiercely loyal to Napoleon.
After just forty days in Turin, Pauline left to take the waters at the spa at Val d’Aosta in the Italian Alps. The area was part of the former royal hunting ground of the House of Savoy. Pauline would not see Camillo again for nearly a decade.6
After Pauline’s departure, an enormous crate arrived at Chiablese from Rome. Before shipping the life-size statue of Pauline Borghese to Turin, Antonio Canova unveiled the work in his studio on Via Giacomo. Canova’s studio manager Antonio D’Este described the public’s reaction to the marble: “It aroused such desire in the illustrious foreigners, who crowded to admire her, and who were not satisfied to worship her by the day, but also in the evening by candlelight they yearned to see her to better appreciate her beauty and the varying hues of her skin, that it was necessary to limit access.”7
Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix represented a dramatic shift for Canova, away from his austere funerary and religious marbles. About the work, art historian Giuseppe Antonio Guattani observed at the time: “She does not elude, she does not deceive. The statue of which it is, and a very real imitation of that beautiful nature, which when fortunately finds in a woman, makes her rightly deserve the name of Venus.”8
Originally, Canova intended to sculpt Pauline Borghese as Diana, chaste goddess of the hunt. But Napoleon’s sister insisted on being portrayed as Venus, goddess of beauty and love. The choice suited both the sitter and the Borgheses who considered themselves descendants of Rome’s founder, Aeneas, son of Venus. Because of this connection, explains art historian Paola Mangia, Venus was a favorite decorative theme in the eighteenth-century renovation of the Borghese Villa. Over ten statues of Venus adorned the Villa’s ground-floor statue gallery. 9
Depicting women with attributes of goddesses was part of an ancient Roman tradition that bestowed divine qualities to imperial family members. Rome’s empresses were often portrayed in statues and coins in the guises of divinities and heroines. Livia, wife of Augustus and mother of Tiberius, was frequently depicted as Ceres with a cornucopia. Nearly two centuries later, Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus, was also portrayed as Ceres along with the personification of Abundance.
Venus was a leitmotif in Canova’s career, from his Venus Italica to replace the Uffizi’s Medici Venus to his 1820 Hope Venus. With Venus Victrix, Canova externalized “the fascination of the goddess through the human guise of Pauline,” writes Paola Mangia, creating a work that represents “an unparalleled stage in the Veneto artist’s sculptural evolution . . .”10
Venus Victrix refers to the fateful beauty contest known as the Judgment of Paris. After judging Venus more beautiful than rival goddesses Minerva and Juno (Hera and Athena), the Trojan prince gave Venus the golden apple of discord from the garden of the Hesperides. Venus then introduced Paris to the beautiful Helen, wife of Sparta’s king Menelaus. Paris’s abduction of Helen caused the Trojan War and the flight of Aeneas to Italy. Out of jealousy, the runner-up goddesses allied themselves with the Greeks against Paris and the Trojans.
Art historians generally agree that Canova’s reclining Venus Victrix was inspired by Titian’s Venus Urbino and Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. As Fernando Mazzocca notes, Canova felt a deep connection to Titian, reflected in his design of a funerary monument for the painter at the Frari in Venice.11 Canova would certainly have also known the Borghese’s Danaë (1531), a late work by the Italian Mannerist Correggio. In Correggio’s take on the story, Eros pulls a sheet off the half-naked, reclining Danaë, with Jupiter hovering over in the form of a golden cloud. Canova, who often painted as a preparatory tool, began experimenting with the reclining pose in the 1780s. His voluptuous nude paintings from this period include Venus with Cupid in Fasce, Venus with Mirror, and Venus with Faun.
Canova may also have been influenced by a more recent addition at the Villa Borghese. For the central canvas in the ceiling of the Stanza del David (named for Bernini’s famous sculpture), Domenico de Angelis chose the Judgement of Paris. De Angelis depicted the victorious Venus holding the apple from Paris while her competitors return to Olympus, where they are met by Jupiter. A well-known bas-relief from a Roman sarcophagus at the nearby Villa Medici provided the model for de Angelis’s work.12
Pauline posed for Canova both in the grand saloon at the Palazzo Borghese and the sculptor’s nearby studio. Canova finished the plaster model by July 1804. From a block of white Carrara marble, he sculpted Pauline reclining on her side on an embroidered marble mattress, draped in a sheet from the waist down. Resting her right arm on two pillows, Pauline seductively touches the nape of her neck with the fingers of her right hand. In her left hand, she holds the famous apple of discord. Canova added ribbons to her Psyche knot, a fashionable take on an ancient Greek coiffure.
Using his signature technique, known as “the last hand,” Canova polished the surface of the finished marble, giving it a deep luster and the lifelike texture of skin. The Italian art historian Leopoldo Cicognara observed that this step not onl
y imparted softness to Canova’s sculptures, but also “sweetness of contours, that subtlety of expression, which is unnecessarily sought and difficult to find in the works of its contemporaries . . . the slightest differences are those that cost more sweat, and lead to higher results . . .”13
Canova also heightened the work’s sensuality by covering Pauline’s skin with a light layer of molten pink wax. The discovery of marble statues with remnants of color, gilding, and glass had sparked a debate in artistic circles about the use of polychromy in antiquity. Canova’s friend Quatremère de Quincy claimed that color was an essential element in the finest Greek sculptures—the gigantic cult figures of Zeus at Olympia and Athena in the Parthenon. Masserini, Canova’s secretary and biographer, commented that the sculptor had noticed a preparation on antique works; Pliny cited Praxiteles as having been admired for similar method. Canova, like his fellow neoclassical sculptors, added subtle color to some of his works. Neoclassical purists criticized the sculptor for adding colored wax to Venus Victrix.14
Pauline’s marble mattress rested on a plaster and wooden Empire-style bed. The mattress resembled a triclinium—an ancient Roman couch used for reclining at meals. Canova covered the base in flowing drapery like on a catafalque—a raised platform used to support coffins. In Greek and Roman art, reclining female figures were often depicted on the lids of sarcophagi. The bed hid a revolving mechanism allowing viewers to experience the work in the round.
Venus Victrix coincided with a busy period for Canova. At the same time that he undertook the sculpture, he was at work on two colossal statues—Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker and Ferdinand of Bourbon with Minerva. In addition to exhibiting finished works in his studio, Canova displayed his terra-cotta and plaster models to show prospective clients. European aristocrats and heads of states queued up for portraits and statues for their own palaces.