by Susan Jaques
Though Elisa made some public improvements, most of her efforts were focused on her own palaces. Like her siblings, she imposed the French Empire style, seeking design advice from its creators Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, and importing Parisian furniture, Sevres porcelain, and silver by Biennais. She also recruited Parisian ébéniste Jean Baptiste Youf who set up a furniture workshop in Lucca.
To make room for the new Piazza Napoleone in front of her palace in Lucca, Elisa leveled an entire block, including the medieval Church of San Paolo, a move that not surprisingly proved very unpopular. For her court’s summer residence, Elisa acquired the eighteenth-century Villa Marlia outside Lucca. In addition to the Empire-style interiors, the Villa sported a new animal park.3 Elisa also restored Lucca’s popular thermal baths.
At her art-filled Paris residence, Hôtel de Maurepas, Elisa had hosted a salon frequented by her brother Lucien and noted academicians. She resumed this role at Piombino and Lucca. Her new court also became known for music. As Christopher Hibbert describes, Elisa hired members of the Puccini family as maestri di cappella and organists at Lucca’s San Martino cathedral. Giovanni Paisiello, one of Napoleon’s favorite composers, dedicated the opera Proserpina to her.4 French architect Pierre-Théodore Bienaimé, who had worked for Elisa in Paris, designed an opera house near the redecorated palace.
Genoese musician Niccolò Paganini, who had performed at Lucca’s annual music festival in 1801, returned to give violin lessons to Felice. At some point, Paganini and Elisa became lovers. In 1807, she appointed the handsome twenty-four-year-old court violinist, conductor, and captain of the gendarmes, an honorary title giving him the right to wear a uniform.5 Paganini wrote a sonata for solo violin in Elisa’s honor and a military sonata for violin and orchestra, “the Napoleon.” According to Sante Bargellini, despite a decade of lessons from the virtuoso, Felice “remained a wretchedly bad player.”6
In March 1806, Napoleon expanded his sister’s realm to include Massa and Carrara. Located just north of Pisa along Tuscany’s west coast, Carrara was one of Europe’s biggest suppliers of white marble. It had taken an eon or two of erosion and tectonic movement to raise the marble up to the surface of the towering Apuan Alps. Northern Tuscany once lay at the bottom of a deep primordial sea brimming with shellfish and tiny calciferous creatures. As Joel Leivick explains, over tens of millions of years, the animals’ skeletal remains formed a limestone sediment on the sea floor. Some twelve million years ago, a continental collision occurred, subjecting the limestone seabed to heat and pressure. About a million years later, the base limestone petrified into white crystals known as marble.7
Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci recognized the geologic forces at work. “Shells that appear on mountain tops and fish bones in caves must be the remains of animals that long ago swam in these places when they were covered in sea,” he wrote. “The claim they were swept there by the biblical flood is a completely inadequate explanation. So the surface of the earth has changed over time, with land where once there was sea.”8 Leonardo would invent a marble-cutting machine for Carrara.
Each quarry boasted marble with distinct color, luminosity, and hardness.9 The most prized bianchi marble ranged from dazzling white, bluish, and flesh color. Like wood, marble has knots and grains called peli, fine lines that crisscross the blocks at irregular intervals. Hidden faults, invisible or created after a block is cut, are known as peli nemici, or enemy faults.
The Romans discovered the exceptional white marble after founding Luni just north of Carrara. Slaves were sent to the colony to extract the stone. Wagons hauled the large slabs to the port of Luni, where they were loaded onto ships for the roughly two-hundred-mile voyage to Rome. To avoid taxes, the marble was engraved A.U.PH., short for ad usum phori—for use in the Forums.10 The first villages in Carrara were settlements established for extracting marble. When the Apuans attacked Roman settlements and quarries, they were deported. For three centuries Luni flourished as a center for shipping wood, cheese, wine, and marble. A small version of the Roman forum and amphitheater were built.
In his Res Gestae, Augustus famously bragged that he had inherited a city of bricks and left Rome a city of marble. Augustus’s reign marked the first time marble was used on a large scale in Roman architecture. To work the Carrara marble, Augustus and his minister Agrippa imported craftsmen from Greece, which had a long history of building with marble from Mount Hymettus and Mount Pentelicus near Athens, along with white marble from Naxos and Paros in the Cyclades. The Greek sculptors brought a classicizing, Hellenic look to Rome’s new buildings. Augustus continued Caesar’s building projects around the Roman Forum along with the area around the Campus Martius west of the Capitoline.11 Augustus built numerous grandiose buildings from Carrara marble—including the Temple of Mars Ultor in his eponymous Forum.
In his famous first-century work Geography, Strabo mentions a “wall of white marble around Augustus’s place of cremation.”12 Strabo also describes Luna’s quarries that supplied the luxe building material for Rome and its provinces: “The harbor [of Luna] is shut in all around by high mountains, from which the high seas are to be seen, as also Sardo [Sardinia] . . . And the quarries of marble, both white and mottled blueish-gray marble, are so numerous, and of such quality (for they yield monolithic slabs and columns), that the material for most of the superior works of art in Rome and the rest of the cities is supplied therefrom; and indeed the marble is easy to export, since the quarries lie above the sea and near it, and since the Tiber in its turn takes up the cargo from the sea and conveys it to Rome.”13 Napoleon had Strabo’s Geography translated into French.
Rome’s successive emperors turned marble into a symbol of wealth and power. As the Empire grew, the coveted marble became a big business; organization and control of the quarries increasingly structured. According to Suetonius, the Luna quarries (and many others) were made imperial property under Tiberius, Augustus’s stepson and successor.14 From Tiberius’s reign on, Luna’s marble quarries were controlled by Rome’s imperial family and administered by the Empire’s accounting office. In addition, colored marble was imported to Rome from quarries in its provinces in Africa, Asia Minor, and the Mediterranean.15
In addition to Carrara, the Romans exploited other marbles for their buildings and sculptures. With its mixture of white and blue-gray layers, Aphrodiasian marble from ancient Aphrodisias (today’s southwest Turkey) was popular from Hellenistic to the late Roman period. From the mid-first to the mid-third century C.E., Romans used dark gray, white veined Bigio Antico marble for building and for large figurative sculptures, and gray Bigio Morato marble for statuary. Both stones were quarried in Teos and islands on the coast of Asia Minor. The green and white-banded Cipollino marble from the island of Euboea in Greece was an especially popular for columns.16
Lustrous Parian type I marble was quarried on Paros in the Cyclades. Because of its remote location, the white to pale yellow Phrygian marble from Docimium in Asia Minor was among the most expensive, prized by Emperors Augustus and Hadrian. Pentelic marble from Mt. Pentelikon near Athens was used widely for sculpture and architecture. Frequently veined, the white marble often turned golden brown after sculpting. White with blue-gray bands, Proconnesian marble was often used for sarcophagi.17
Ranging from light red to dark purple, marmor Taenareum (Rosso Antico) was prized for its similarity to porphyry. Quarried in small blocks on Cape Tainaron (today’s Matapan, Peloponnese), Crete, and Asia Minor’s Iasos, it was mainly used by the Romans for small architectural elements. Romans used the white Thasian dolomitic marble from the Aegean island of Thasos for sculpture, architecture, and sarcophagi.18
Still, Carrara marble enjoyed a greater reputation among ancient sculptors than even the prized Pentelic, Hymetian, and Parian marbles. Many of the greatest monuments of antiquity, including the Pantheon, Trajan’s Column, and the Column of Marcus Aurelius, were carved from Carrara marble. Trajan’s Forum alone required an estimated 34
,000 cubic yards of marble.19
With Rome’s fall, Luna’s storied quarries were abandoned. Around 1000 C.E., Carrara passed to the bishops of Luni who reopened the quarries. From the 1300s to the 1450s, the quarries were controlled by eight different powers, including the Florentines, Lucchese, Milanese, Dukes of Carrara, and the duchy of Modenas. Fourteenth-century methods had not improved much since the Roman era and extracting the prized marble was a risky occupation.
Teams of lizzatori, or stonecutters, climbed the mountain peaks, drilling holes in the rock into which they drove wooden stakes. Wetting the wood expanded the stone, allowing blocks to be split off. The blocks were then slid down the steep slopes on wooden lizzas, or sleds, pulled by oxen. The only thing controlling the multi-ton marble blocks were ropes. Many miners lost their lives in the process. In 1442, the area came under the control of the Marquis Malaspina of Massa. Gunpowder was introduced to the quarries in 1570, but proved too destructive, reducing much of the prized marble to dust.
Carrara marble enjoyed renewed popularity during the Renaissance. Marble that broke easily was considered to be more alive; sometimes described as containing a soul or anima.20 The Florentines, referred to sculptors as “masters of la pietra viva” or live stone.21Renaissance sculptors traveled to the Apuan Alps to personally choose the finest marble for their works. Michelangelo was among the first to recognize the quality of Carrara’s beds, carving his masterpieces David (Florence) and the Pietà (St. Peter’s Basilica) from its marble. The renowned artist worked in the Serra gorge, favoring the whitest, most finely veined marble. At one point, Michelangelo dreamed of carving a giant out of the five-thousand-foot Monte Sagro. ‘‘If I could have been sure of living four times longer than I have lived, I would have taken it on,” he declared.22
Michelangelo would eventually open up rival quarries for the Medici, including Pietrasanta. Still, Carrara remained a favorite. “He loved the very quarries of Carrara,” writes Walter Pater, “those strange gray peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene from which they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness of evening, sometimes wandering among them month after month . . .”23
During one visit to Carrara, Michelangelo carved his initials “MB” onto a surviving ancient aedicule. In the first century C.E., a Roman slave named Scarpellino carved a relief on a rock face overlooking the quarry at the middle of the Miseglia basin. The bas-relief featured three divinities—Hercules, Jupiter, and Bacchus—standing between incised columns, possibly a temple. These votive reliefs known as aediculae were common in the quarries. Slaves prayed to them on their way to work. Michelangelo signed his initials between Hercules’s club and leg. Successive sculptors like Bernini and Giombologna continued the tradition, leaving their signatures below and to the side of the ancient bas-relief.
The quarry that produced the marble for Michelangelo’s David was named “Fantiscritti” after fanti, the three small gods, and scritti, the sculptors’ signatures. Toward the end of 1784, Antonio Canova traveled to Carrara to select marbles for his monument to Clement XIV. During another visit to the Del Medico family, Canova carved “Canova 1800” in a rough sprawling scrawl. According to Mario Guderzo, Canova probably returned to the fabled quarry on other occasions, but usually entrusted the selection of marbles to Antonio D’Este, director of his studio in Rome. Canova even designed his business card with the image of his signature on the marble.24
The striking quarries of Carrara had a spiritual resonance for sculptors. “They had carried out an act of association by carving their names into the rock of this ancient site,” writes Alison Yarrington, “leaving their imprint on this source of some of the most beautiful sculptures of antiquity and more modern times . . .”25 In 1863, the famous autographed aedicule of Fantiscritti was detached from the summit of the quarry and moved to the courtyard of Carrara’s Academy of Fine Arts. Today it is on display inside Palazzo del Principe, a building that houses the Academy.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the marble quarries were controlled by the Cybo and Malaspina families who ruled over Massa and Carrara. The family created the Office of Marble in 1564 to regulate the marble mining industry. Massa was completely redesigned with new roads and plazas. The Basilica of Massa that housed the famous Iron Crown was built exclusively with Carrara marble; the old Ducal Palace also showcased the precious stone. By the eighteenth century, explosives were used to dislodge huge quantities of rock quickly; large irregular blocks were squared by hand.
The quarries languished until Napoleon swept across northern Italy. As a builder of monuments, Napoleon was an even greater marble consumer than the French kings, writes Eric Scigliano.26 It was Napoleon’s sister Elisa who turned the factory around, glorifying her powerful brother with mass production of his portrait bust. During her eight years as head of the quarries, Carrara enjoyed a revival, regaining its near monopoly over the marble market.
The energetic grand duchess immediately instituted changes at the storied quarry, modernizing operations. In October 1807, Elisa convinced Lorenzo Bartolini to return to his native Tuscany to direct the Academy of Carrara. Bartolini had produced the monumental herm-like bronze Napoléon Empereur for the entrance to the Musée Napoléon. A fervent Francophile and staunch Bonapartist, Bartolini named his eldest sons Girolamo-Napoleone and Paolo Napoleone.
In January 1808, Bartolini succeeded Milanese sculptor Angelo Pizzi as head of the Carrara Academy, and became chief of Carrara’s highly profitable workshops. Bartolini’s main responsibility was producing and directing production of large quantities of Bonaparte family portraiture. All satellite states were expected to have portraits of the emperor and his family, and busts were reproduced en masse and shipped to Europe’s various courts. Carrara enjoyed a veritable monopoly on official portraits of the imperial family.27
To provide the factory with new financial resources and provide support for sculptors and workers, Elisa created a credit institution, the Banca Elisiana. Favorable new customs tariffs helped Tuscan sculpture spread throughout the Empire. The neoclassical craze made Carrara’s white marble highly fashionable. In addition to portraits, the factory turned out fireplaces, tombs, altars, clocks, and statues.
Bartolini also oversaw the execution of the most prestigious commissions. In early May 1807, Elisa began issuing authorized copies of Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s portrait bust of her brother in Carrara. The copies were slightly altered from the original, without the crown, belt, or mantle. The austere marble busts proved so popular with Bonapartists and for public buildings in France that Bartoloni produced copies of Chaudet’s “crowned” versions. For the hundreds of copies, Bartolini made small modifications to the originals, including the addition of crowns or laurels, or both. Elisa opened a shop in Paris to sell her brother’s popular portrait busts after plasters by Chaudet and Canova; forty sold in the summer of 1808.28
The Malaspina family had established Carrara’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1769. Now to enhance its prestige and improve the training of students, Elisa enlarged the collection of plaster casts. Among the donations from well-known neoclassical sculptors were some thirty casts by Lorenzo Bartolini, Antonio Canova, and Bertel Thorvaldsen. Canova’s donations include casts for such works as the fighters Creugas and Damoxenos, the Penitent Maddalena, and Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte as Agrippina.
Bartolini trained a new generation of marble sculptors. Like his mentor Jacques-Louis David, the sculptor emphasized drawing and the use of live models. Besides Bartolini, the Academy’s teachers included French painter Desmarais, the poet Giovanni Fantoni, and Lorenzo Papi. In 1810, Elisa relocated the Academy to an expanded palace. She created a prize for a three-year study program in Rome for students to apprentice at the studios of famous artists.
On November 28, 1807, Elisa Baciocchi accompanied her brother on his official visit to Venice. Napoleon made a brief stop in Milan where he tried unsuccessfully to convince his brother Lucien to divorce his wife and become king of Spa
in. The entourage also included Eugène de Beauharnais, the sovereigns of Bavaria and their children, the grand duke of Berg, the prince of Neuchâtel, ministers Champagny and Decrès, and Duroc, Marshal of the Palace. Several days later, Lucien and Joseph, king of Naples, joined the entourage.
As a general, Napoleon had regarded the Venetian Republic as a symbol of excess. Napoleon turned Venice over to the Austrians, reducing the once powerful maritime Republic to a lowly province. In 1805, after defeating Austria a second time, Napoleon took Venice back, incorporating it into his new Kingdom of Italy. In another setback for Venice, Napoleon chose Milan as its capital. The following July, by vice regal decree, nine Venetian churches, fifteen monasteries, and nineteen nunneries were closed, an anti-monastic policy that would continue. These religious buildings were stripped of their art; many of the finest works were displayed at Milan’s Brera gallery. Napoleon’s ongoing war with England led to the collapse of Venice’s maritime commerce.
Still, the Venetians did their best to make a good impression for Napoleon’s visit. During the grand entry, Mayor Daniele Renier gave Napoleon two keys to the city in silver and gold. At the north entrance to the Grand Canal near the Church of Santa Lucia, a floating triumphal arch was erected, part of a long Venetian tradition that began with Andrea Palladio’s ephemeral arch for France’s Henri III. Giuseppe Borsato created the decoration for the arch that was topped with statues of Victory and Genius and sported Victories between the Doric columns.
With soldiers of the Italian Royal Guard lining the shore, Napoleon and the imperial procession passed under the triumphant arch and traversed the Grand Canal in the ceremonial vessel, the peata (largest of the traditional Venetian cargo boats) accompanied by five bissone, a dozen rowers, and twenty-one private bissone.29 After disembarking at the Piazzetta, Napoleon and his entourage proceeded to their lodgings at the Palazzo Reale in the Procuratie Nuove.