by Susan Jaques
In Germaine de Staël’s 1807 autobiographical novel, Corinne, Or Italy written during her exile by Napoleon, her heroine and Lord Nelvil visit Canova’s studio to view his sculptures by torchlight. “By the light of the torches, the shade more pronounced dampens the brilliant uniformity of the marble, and the statues appear pale figures, which have a more touching effect of grace and life.”
Painter Francesco Hayez’s firsthand account of Canova’s workshop offers further insights into his creative process: “The studio consisted of a number of rooms, all full of models and statues, and here all could enter,” he wrote. “Canova had a secluded chamber, closed to visitors, to which only those with special permission were admitted. He wore a kind of robe with a paper hat on his head; a hammer and chisel were always in his hands even when receiving visitors; he would talk and work at the same time, then suddenly stop working and turn to the person he was talking to.”15
To keep up with demand, Canova hired studio assistants. Their presence may have also been necessary because of an injury he suffered while producing a funerary monument for Pope Clement XIV. While drilling the marble he had personally selected in Carrara, Canova repeatedly pressed a borer into his body, damaging his right rib cage. For the rest of his life, the sculptor suffered painful stomach problems.
As Canova chiseled away at a rough-hewn block of marble, his assistants often read classical literature out loud to him; he frequently drew upon the same literary sources for sculptural subjects.16 Canova seems to have been self-conscious about his lack of formal education. “If I write badly in Latin and in Italian, remember the statues,” he wrote his friend Giannantonio Selva in 1794.17
Perhaps to compensate, Canova became a bibliophile. The sculptor began assembling a large library in fall 1779 when he bought guides to Rome’s churches, palaces, and monuments. Lining his bookshelves were rare ancient and modern folios, engravings of famous antiquities, and illustrated catalogues of museum collections. Titles ranged from Plato, Plutarch, and Homer to Dante, Locke, Alfieri, and Byron. He read eighteenth-century history, art criticism, and texts by philosopher Francesco Algarotti, art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs.18
Canova’s Venus Victrix became known in Rome as La Paolina. Pauline Borghese’s love life added to the marble’s fame, as did its nudity and sensuality. Napoleon’s sister seems to have reveled in the attention. When asked if she minded posing nude, Pauline replied: “Why should I? The studio was heated.”19 In 1808, Pauline wrote to Camillo in Turin, urging him to allow Venus Victrix to travel to Paris. Four of Canova’s works, including his statue of her mother, Madame Mère Seated, were to be displayed for the prestigious Salon at the Musée Napoléon.
Canova began the full-length seated portrait of Maria-Letizia Ramolino shortly before accepting the commission for Pauline Borghese’s sculpture. He based the portrait of the formidable Bonaparte matriarch on the Capitoline’s famous antique statue of Agrippina (second or fourth century C.E.). Canova portrayed Letizia like the ancient female figure, sitting on a curved leg chair, her sandaled feet on a footstool, wearing the fashionable classically inspired garb. Madame Mère apparently liked this type of classical dress. For a ball celebrating Napoleon’s promotion to first consul for life, she came dressed as the tragic bacchant Erigone.
But which Agrippina was Canova comparing Letizia Bonaparte to? The loyal, principled Agrippina the Elder or her conniving, murderous daughter Agrippina the Younger? The two were often confused through the centuries. As direct descendants of Augustus through his first wife Scribonia, both Agrippinas were key to Rome’s dynastic succession.20
Agrippina the Elder married Germanicus, nephew of Tiberius, who died abroad under suspicious circumstances. The jealous Tiberius was rumored to have done in his charismatic nephew. Forced into exile by Tiberius, the widowed Agrippina starved herself to death. Agrippina the Younger reportedly had incestuous relationships with two future emperors, her brother Caligula and her son Nero. After poisoning her second husband Claudius in 54 C.E., she finagled Nero onto the throne, in lieu of Claudius’s own son with Messalina. But Agrippina soon became the victim of matricide. After a failed poisoning and several drowning attempts, Nero hired thugs to stab his mother.
In either case, argues Mary Beard, Canova’s Madame Mère Seated was an insult to Napoleon. “If there was an honorable option for Madame Mère herself here in the model of Agrippina the Elder, there certainly wasn’t one for Napoleon. One thing that both these Agrippinas good and bad had in common were their truly terrible sons. Agrippina the Elder gave birth to the mad Caligula and Agrippina the Younger gave birth to the equally mad Nero. There were not a few critics and commentators who felt that had been Canova’s point and that through the imperial mother, Canova’s target was actually Napoleon.”21
Letizia Ramolina Bonaparte had a complex relationship with her powerful son, the second of her eight surviving children. Napoleon was reportedly embarrassed by his pious, barely literate mother who spoke Corsican-Italian, not French. Despite Napoleon’s increasing power, Letizia did not hesitate to express her opinions, including her displeasure with his treatment of Lucien and his marriage to Joséphine. About his position as emperor, Letizia presciently declared “Let us hope it will last!”
Napoleon gave Letizia the title Her Imperial Highness, Mother of the Emperor, or Madame Mère. Along with an annual pension of three hundred thousand francs and a jewelry collection, she had her own household. This included a chamberlain, the Comte de Cossé-Brissac, an equerry, General de Beaumont (a former page of Louis XVI), several chaplains, a lady of honor, ladies-in-waiting, a secretary, and an intendant.22 Napoleon gave his mother the keys to the Grand Trianon, built by Louis XIV at Versailles for Madame de Montespan, but she hated it and considered it uncomfortable.23 In 1805, Napoleon bought his mother the Château de Pont-sur-Seine in the Aube in the northeast of France. Despite her son’s generosity, Madame Mère remained notoriously stingy.24
Canova’s portrait of Pauline Bonaparte never joined that of her mother in Paris. The seminude marble resembled his wife so strongly, an embarrassed Camillo Borghese kept it hidden from public view inside the Palazzo Chiablese. Along with Gros’s Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau, Canova’s Madame Mère Seated proved a hit at the Salon, but not with her son who may have understood that the underlying subject was himself. Rather than install the marble opposite his throne at the Tuileries as his mother had requested, Napoleon packed it away to the palace storeroom.
Despite his resentment toward Napoleon’s policies in Italy, Canova accepted a number of commissions to sculpt his female family members after classical and mythological figures, a Roman tradition. In addition to Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix and Letizia Bonaparte as Agrippina, Canova portrayed Napoleon’s sister-in-law Alexandrine de Bleschamp as Terpsichore, second wife Marie-Louise as Concordia, and sister Elisa Bonaparte as the Greek muse Polyhymnia. Canova produced an extraordinary gallery of the Bonaparte women, writes Mario Guderzo, “placing the characters in timeless, heroic and poetic dimensions, ensured by instruments of classical sculpture, the nude and ancient drapery.”25
Of all these marble portraits, the masterpiece remained Venus Victrix. The work’s erotic Classicism proved influential for other artists. As Stefano Grandesso notes, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (painted in 1814 for Pauline’s sister Caroline Murat) recalls Venus Victrix in its composition and naked back.26 With the work, Canova also immortalized Pauline Borghese. “It is one of the absolutely iconic images of woman in Western art,” writes Robert Hughes, “as justly celebrated in its way as the Mona Lisa, and not without a parallel mystery of expression.”27
In the summer of 1808, while Romans were ogling Venus Victrix at Canova’s studio, the first of two huge convoys of wagons left the city. The cargo was so heavy, specially built carts drawn by a dozen oxen each were required.28
Inside were hundreds of statues, busts, and bas-reliefs from t
he famed Borghese collection, considered one of the most important private collections of Roman antiquities. In addition to works from the Borgheses’ Museo di Gabbii and Villa, the trove included antiquities stripped from the Villa’s façade.
In May 1806, Napoleon directed Dominique-Vivant Denon and antiquities curator Ennio Quirino Visconti to secretly evaluate the antique masterpieces belonging to his brother-in-law. “Three days ago, all of a sudden, three French commissioners appeared,” wrote Pius VII’s secretary of state Cardinal Ercole Consalvi. “They went to the Villa Borghese and very carefully looked over all the ancient statues and bas-reliefs . . . ”29
The knowledgeable Visconti, part of a dynasty of Roman antiquarians responsible for the papal collections, estimated every piece. Visconti was familiar with the Borgheses’ archeological finds at family-owned land at Gabii, south of Rome, having written a book about them in 1797. Visconti took into account each object’s archeological context or provenance in his appraisal. He recommended to Napoleon that he acquire the Borgheses’ entire antiquities collection, but the emperor believed there wasn’t enough space in the Musée Napoléon.
The extraordinary trove of antiquities got its start in 1605 when Camillo Borghese’s namesake was elected pope. Paul V continued his predecessor Sixtus V’s building spree, constructing the Acqua Paola aqueduct, completing the façade of St. Peter’s Basilica, and decorating the Palazzo del Quirinale, the papal summer palace.30 In another fateful move, the pope named his sister’s twenty-six-year-old son, Scipione Caffarella, his cardinal-nephew.
The Borghese family’s wealth allowed Scipione to indulge his passion for art. Assuming the name Borghese and purple robes of a cardinal, Scipione set about amassing a world-class art collection featuring antique sculpture and contemporary painting and sculpture. Scipione proved an adept talent scout. In addition to assembling one of the largest collection of Caravaggio paintings, he cultivated a young sculpture prodigy, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Nothing stood in Scipione Borghese’s way. In 1607, he had his powerful uncle confiscate over one hundred pictures from Mannerist painter Giuseppe Cesari when he didn’t pay his taxes.31 The loot included Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Sick Bacchus. On another occasion, Scipione hired a gang to rip Raphael’s Deposition from the Baglioni Altarpiece in Perugia’s Church of San Francesco. After refusing to sell Scipione Diana and the Hunt commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, artist Domenichino was hauled off to jail. Scipione got his painting.32
As showplaces for his art treasures, Scipione accumulated multiple properties, including a palace in the Borgo near the Vatican, a family seat near Ripetta port in the Campus Martius, a palace on the Quirinal, and a country villa at Frascati.33 To display his growing antiquities collection, Scipione also built the Villa Borghese and garden on the family’s vast suburban property outside the city walls by the porta Pinciana. As Carole Paul writes, Scipione used the villa to “fashion a link between the ancient past and the Borghese family.”34 Antiquities adorned the façade of the Villa Borghese—some seventy busts, forty-three statues, and 144 bas-reliefs. Inside, sculpture was the main attraction. Unlike many of his paintings that he seized, Scipione bought antiquities, many from Lelio Coeli and scholar Giovanni Battista della Porta.
In 1619, Scipione hired Bernini to carve a mattress for one of his masterpieces, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite. Discovered near the Baths of Diocletian about a decade earlier, the marble is considered a Roman copy of a Greek original from the second century B.C.E. An excavation sponsored by Scipione unearthed another treasure. Found among the ruins of Nero’s seaside palace in ancient Antium south of Rome was the Borghese Gladiator. Carved around 100 B.C.E., the life-size, muscle-bound fighter is shown raising his arm to fend off a blow. The tree trunk bears the rare signature of its creator, Agasias of Ephesus (today’s Turkey) who revived the athletic heroism of Lysippos, the famed bronze sculptor of the fourth century B.C.E.35
Another prize, the Borghese Vase, was discovered in the sixteenth century in the gardens of Sallust, Rome. Standing nearly six feet, the vase represents the Roman taste for lavish garden decoration. Adorning the vase in low relief are satyrs and maenads in a Bacchic procession presided over by a half-naked Dionysus and his wife Ariadne. At the time, the vase was valued at two hundred thousand francs (roughly 1.1 million dollars today).36 Much reproduced, the renowned vase inspired the decoration of the Fountain of Leto at Versailles.
During Scipione’s lifetime, the Villa Borghese was hailed as a showplace. When the collector died in 1633, his cousin Marcantonio II inherited the art and real estate, becoming one of the wealthiest men in Italy. A century and a half later, art-loving Marcantonio IV picked up where Scipione left off. Around 1775, he began an ambitious two-decade-long neoclassical renovation of the villa. Each room was named for the most coveted ancient statue on display. Masterpieces of the sculpture collection were reinstalled, with decorative themes designed to complement these works. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid inspired marble reliefs and painted ceilings and walls by a team of international painters and sculptors.37
The refurbished Villa became one of Rome’s most important museums, alongside the antiquities collections at the Villa Albani and papal museums. In parallel with the Villa renovation, the Museo Gabbino in the Villa’s clock pavilion displayed ancient finds from Gabii. Marcantonio also added an English-style park at the Villa decorated with ancient statues, including the Temple of Aesculapius and the faux ruins of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. The publication of two illustrated volumes increased the collection’s renown among European cognoscenti.
In 1800, Marcantonio IV’s eldest son Camillo succeeded him as head of the Borghese family. Three years later, he married into the Bonaparte family. Despite considerable pressure from his powerful brother-in-law, Camillo was reluctant to sell the family’s prized antiquities. Denon suggested to Napoleon that he double Visconti’s estimate of five million francs. At Fontainebleau in September 1807, Napoleon signed a contract for thirteen million francs (about $71.5 million dollars today). To sweeten the deal, Napoleon named Camillo governor general of Piedmont and Genoa.
Of the hundreds of antiquities, Napoleon was most taken with the portrait busts. As Souren Melikian writes, these constituted a gallery of celebrities of the Roman Empire to which Napoleon saw himself as heir.38 The images included Marcus Aurelius and a bearded Lucius Verus unearthed near Rome at Acqua Traversa, along with a bust of Augustus’s son-in-law, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, dug up in 1792 in Gabii. Praetor, governor, consul, and edile, responsible for the renovation and construction of Rome’s aqueducts, baths, and sewers, Agrippa is depicted with his hair combed forward, steely and resolute. The marble copy may have been modeled after a large bronze in the Pantheon.
The further loss of Rome’s cultural patrimony to France caused an uproar. On visits to the Borghese Villa starting in 1779, Antonio Canova had admired the antiquities, studying masterworks like the Gladiator and Centaur with the Young Jupiter along with a number of Venuses. Now Canova and Cardinal Filippo Casoni, Pius’s secretary of state at the time, appealed to the pope to stop the sale. But since the deal had been executed legally, Pius’s hands were tied. Canova would denounce the sale of “the most beautiful private collection in the world,” declaring “That family [Borghese] will be dishonored as long as history is written!”39
With maritime routes cut off by England, the Borghese collection had to travel across the Alps. Napoleon originally planned to display the prize at a summer house in the countryside, at a residence similar to the Borghese Villa in Rome. But the decision was made instead to exhibit the antiquities at the Musée Napoléon.
The Borghese antiquities were a tremendous addition to the museum’s antiquities department, formed in 1793 with the former royal collections and other objects seized during the Revolution, as well as Napoleon’s treasures from the Vatican. The Hall of the Caryatids debuted in 1811 with an exhibition of some of the Borghese trea
sures. But by the following summer, 180 packing boxes, half the total, remained unopened.40 In the end, Camillo Borghese was only paid 8.3 million of the agreed upon 13 million francs.41
FOUR
CARRARA
After a real estate swap with Spain’s Bourbons, Napoleon awarded Piombino to his eldest sister Elisa and brother-in-law Felice Pasquale Baciocchi in March 1805. With its proximity to Corsica and Elba, the small principality on Italy’s west coast was of strategic importance. In June, Napoleon added the nearby Republic of Lucca to the couple’s purview, confiding that the promotion was “not from fraternal tenderness but out of political prudence.”1
That July, on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the princess made a grand entrance in a carriage drawn by four horses, a gift from Napoleon. Elisa and Felice were accompanied by their household—twenty-five equerries, chamberlains, ladies-in-waiting, a majordomo, a doctor, butlers, soldiers, and officials.
Elisa’s sisters were extremely jealous of her appointment. Hortense recalled Caroline’s reaction. “Well! So Elisa is now a sovereign princess. She is going to have an army of four men and a corporal. It really is a fine thing!” Pauline, who disliked her older sister, also weighed in. “My brother only cared for Elisa and is not interested in the rest of us,” she said.2
The ambitious and capable Elisa ran both principalities. As Austrian Foreign Minister Clemens von Metternich put it, her husband Felice had an “entire want of intellectual faculties.” The best educated of the Bonaparte sisters, Elisa spent ten years at the college of Saint-Cyr near Paris, and returned to Ajaccio just in time for her family to flee to Marseilles. In June 1797, Elisa married Felice, a Corsican captain fifteen years her senior, in a double ceremony near Milan with her sister Pauline and Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc.