by Susan Jaques
Soon after his arrival, Napoleon conducted a private inspection of the Arsenal. The previous August, Eugène de Beauharnais unveiled a bust of his stepfather in the shipyard where twenty new cannon ships were scheduled to be built. On Wednesday December 2, 1807, the third anniversary of his coronation, Napoleon returned to the Arsenal along with the Lido, launching two corvettes for the French Navy. On both visits, he praised the efforts of the shipbuilders and workers. Refusing to give up on challenging England at sea, Napoleon allocated 8.1 million francs to rebuilding the French fleet. He told workers that their efforts were important to give the English “the lesson they deserved.”30
Among the planned festivities was a regatta hosted in Napoleon’s honor. Spectators clamored in windows and carpet-festooned balconies for a glimpse of the emperor. At the turn of the canal alongside Ca’Foscari, Giuseppe Borsato constructed and decorated a “macchina” with statues. The entertainment featured carnival feats like the human pyramid known as the Force of Hercules. Napoleon assisted in the boat race with his family by a loggia set up on the façade of the nearby Palazzo Balbi. The regatta was followed by a banquet and ball at the Ridotto, and a Te Deum at St. Mark’s. The city was lit by over four thousand torches.
Napoleon was reportedly pleased with a visit to the Marciana Library where he was shown papers suggesting that the Bonapartes descended from an ancient Roman family, the Bona Pars. Napoleon, an opera fan, also attended performances at the Gran Teatro La Fenice, The Phoenix. Rebuilt after a fire in the classical Italian style by Giannantonio Selva in 1792, the theater featured a number of sealed logge, or balconies, reminiscent of the Italian piazza. More changes followed during the French occupation to turn it into a state theater. For Napoleon’s reception, Selva decorated the theater in blue and silver, and built a temporary loggia in lieu of a royal box. On December 1, 1807, Napoleon took his seat in the loggia to watch a performance of the cantata Il Giudizio di Giove, The Judgment of Jupiter by Lauro Corniani Algarotti. Jupiter resembled Napoleon, who was lauded as a quasi-divinity.
The previous year, work had been carried out at La Scala in Milan, capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Now Milan contributed 150,000 Italian lire for a permanent imperial box and new décor for La Fenice.31 Giuseppe Borsato designed the Empire-style box with a triumphant Apollo in a coach surrounded by a chorus of the muses, evoking Napoleon’s victories. Borsato would become La Fenice’s official stage designer for over a decade.
On December 3, Napoleon traveled to Murano to inspect the island’s glass factories. Since the eighth century, Venice had been a center for glassmaking, refining techniques from the Roman and Byzantine empires. Napoleon’s elimination in 1797 of the Venetian guild system, including glassmakers, had hurt the already declining industry. Over the next two days, Napoleon made stops at San Giorgio Maggiore (where Pius VII had been elected pope), Torcello, Burano, and S. Erasmo.
On December 7, shortly after Napoleon’s departure, a grand urban plan was announced with Giannantonio Selva as official architect. As in Paris, Napoleon hoped to improve traffic and aesthetics by straightening and widening streets. To prevent contagion, a new cemetery was to be built away from the city center on San Cristoforo in the northern lagoon. Other projects included an extension of the Riva degli Schiavoni, a new public garden, and a large piazza on Guidecca opposite San Giorgio Maggiore for military displays. Napoleon also removed the gates of the Ghetto, ending restrictions on Jewish residents. It was said that Napoleon made more changes in Venice in four days than Austria had in four years.32
Shortly after his state visit, the emperor ordered the Ala Napoleonica or Napoleonic Wing constructed in Venice’s famed Piazza San Marco. Dubbed “the finest drawing room in Europe,” the Piazza had been the Venetian Republic’s political and religious center. Eugène de Beauharnais initially awarded the prestigious project to Milanese architect Giovanni Antonio Antolini. But Antolini’s plan to demolish the beloved ensemble proved highly controversial. After many changes and Antolini’s replacement by architect Giuseppe Maria Soli, work finally began in 1810.
The Ala Napoleonica was located between the Procuratie Vecchie and Nuove, two long arcades running the length of St. Mark’s Square that formerly housed offices and residences of the Republic’s political VIPs. With a façade facing St. Mark’s Basilica, the wing featured a monumental neoclassical staircase and an opulent ballroom. At Antonio Canova’s recommendation, Lorenzo Santi was hired to supervise the interiors. The multifaceted artist Giuseppe Borsato went to work, applying a sophisticated take on Percier and Fontaine’s Empire style.
Borsato dressed the elegant grand staircase with balusters, Ionic pilasters, facings in stone and pink marble, bas-reliefs of winged Victories and garlands, military trophies, and scenes from ancient history. The staircase led to a salon (today’s Museo Correr bookshop) that served as a vestibule to the ballroom. The walls and the ceiling are decorated with frescoes and paintings in cameo executed by Borsato and his workshop. Napoleon never got to enjoy his new abode. Finished when Venice was under Austrian rule, the Ala Napoleonica became the official Venice residence of the Habsburgs and the king of Italy.
A month before the state visit, Napoleon and Spain’s monarchs signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, transferring the Kingdom of Etruria (Tuscany) to the French Empire. Called Etruria after the region’s ancient Roman name, the kingdom was established in 1801. As part of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain returned Louisiana to France, along with Elba. Initially, Etruria was ruled by the Spanish princess Maria Louisa and her sickly husband and first cousin Louis, great grandson of Louis XV, and son of Ferdinand, grand duke of Parma and Maria Amalia of Austria.
Since the death of thirty-year-old Louis in 1803, Maria Louisa had ruled Etruria as regent for their son, Charles Louis. Now she and her children left for Spain. In recognition of Elisa’s accomplishments and organizational skills, Napoleon named his sister Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Elisa moved her court to Florence, taking along Niccolò Paganini. Felice was made a general in charge of a local military division and given his own less formal court in the Via Della Pergola.33 While the couple appeared together publicly, they led separate lives.
Elisa replaced many of her old courtiers in Lucca, establishing a grander court style modeled after the Tuileries Palace.34 Elisa was also trying to compete with Caroline’s splendid court in Naples. Deeming Pitti Palace completely unsatisfactory, she hired her cabinetmaker Youf to produce consoles, toilettes, psyches, dejeuners, and beds for Florence.35 Elisa also hired a team of Italian cabinetmakers to supply Parisian-style furniture. In 1810, when the Pitti Palace became an imperial residence for her brother, Elisa ordered more furniture.
As she did near Lucca, Elisa acquired and redecorated houses around Florence, including the Villa of Poggio Imperiale that Medici Cosimo I confiscated from the Salviati.36 During the summer, Elisa moved her grand ducal court to the Villa Reale at Marlia, which she had rebuilt and redecorated in neoclassical style by Bienaimè and Lazzarini. Youf created the furniture for Elisa’s palatial villa at Massa.
In addition to her design team, Elisa assembled artists like Lucchese painter Stefano Torelli and Florentine Pietro Benvenuti. In 1809, Elisa met with Antonio Canova. The sculptor had traveled to Florence to supervise construction of the tomb of poet Vittorio Alfieri in Santa Croce Basilica. Elisa hosted a banquet in Canova’s honor at the Pitti Palace and commissioned Benvenuti to paint a canvas of her entire court with the celebrated sculptor. During the visit, she also commissioned Canova to sculpt her portrait.
Among Elisa’s court artists was Giovanni Santarelli, a Rome-trained engraver. Santarelli executed relief portraits in wax as models for medals and cameos.37 Elisa also brought French porcelain techniques and styles to Florence’s Ginori porcelain factory. Founded in 1735 by Florentine marquis Carlo Ginori, the factory developed a new style featuring cameo decoration based on a model from Sèvres. In addition to Carrara, Elisa supported Florence’s hardstone workshops. The Opificio de
lle Pietre Dure, which began as grand ducal workshops under the Medici, started producing Empire-style table tops.
From time to time, Elisa stood up to her brother, a risky proposition. In 1810 for example, when Napoleon demanded she fork over some two hundred thousand lira in grants he had made to Massa and Carrara, she refused, arguing the areas lacked the resources. Napoleon threatened to take back Carrara, her success story. Elisa signed her letters to Napoleon “Your most devoted and submissive sister,” and signed official documents with an E like her brother’s N.38
One of Elisa’s pet projects was to send her brother a complete set of the family’s portrait busts—Madame Mère and her eight children.39 For the series, Lorenzo Bartolini sculpted Madame Mère in antique drapery with a wreath of laurels. The graceful busts of Caroline and Pauline were based on prototypes by Canova; those of Jérôme, Louis, and Joseph were after French and Italian models. Thanks to a prototype by Bartolini, Elisa, like her brother, bears an uncanny resemblance to Julius Caesar.40
PART SIX
CAPITAL OF THE UNIVERSE
“I am Charlemagne, the sword of the Church and their emperor.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte
ONE
ABDUCTION
On the balmy night of July 5, 1809, a gentle breeze stirred at the Quirinale Palace, the summer residence of the popes. The palace took its name from its location on the northwestern slope of the Quirinale, highest of Rome’s seven ancient hills on the east bank of the Tiber. The hill itself was named for a third-century B.C.E. temple dedicated to the cult of Quirinus, rebuilt after a fire by Augustus in 16 B.C.E. In the early third-century C.E., Caracalla added the Baths of Constantine and Temple of Serapis.
Like the ancient Romans, the city’s cardinals and patricians appreciated the prime hilltop real estate and built summer retreats here. In addition to splendid views of Rome, the Quirinal offered an oasis from the summer heat and the foul smell of the Tiber. In 1583, Pope Gregory XIII began building a summer palace on a view property originally owned by the Neapolitan cardinal Oliviero Carafa. For the next century and a half, architects including Ottaviano Mascherino, Carlo Maderno, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini would enlarge and embellish the residence on behalf of their papal patrons.
In 1585, Gregory’s dragon emblem was replaced atop the Quirinal Tower by Sixtus V’s cartouche of mountains and a star. The new pope loved the quietude of the summer palace at night—a dramatic change from the Vatican where he was often awakened by bells, drums, dogs, and roosters. In frustration, the sleep-deprived pontiff ordered the bells of the Vatican silenced.1
Two years into his short five-year pontificate, Sixtus bought the property from the Carafa family and revived Gregory’s ambitious building plan. Architect Domenico Fontana created an elegant inner courtyard by adding a long wing and a second larger palace. A two-story barracks was built for the pope’s Swiss guards. To improve the piazza in front of the palace, Sixtus repositioned the famous marble horses and their tamers around a fountain fed by water from the newly finished Felice aqueduct.
The ancient sculptural group known as the Dioscuri had been partially restored by Paul II over a century earlier. Once adorning the Baths of Constantine, the works depicted the twin demigods Castor and Pollux taming their horses. The famous duo had stood here for so long, the Quirinal Hill was also called Monte Cavallo, or Hill of the Horse.
Aldobrandi Pope Clement VIII embellished the palace gardens, astonishing guests with a series of baroque fountains built on top of the ancient temple of Quirinus. These include the Fountain of the Dwarf, Fountain of Mirrors, and Fountain of the Dog. A flight of marble steps led to a special apse-like building housing the extant Organ Fountain where water powered a musical mechanism inside a tall niche. A pair of seated cupids flanking the pipes blew trumpets to the music; decorative panels depicted the creation, the story of Moses, and the mythology of water.2
In the early seventeenth century, Borghese Pope Paul V completed the palace, adding an east wing adjacent to the garden, a large hall of the consistory, papal apartments, staircase of honor, and a private Chapel of the Annunciation featuring an altarpiece by Guido Reni. With its high ceiling, the Pauline Chapel was intended to rival St. Peter’s Sistine Chapel, but Paul V ran out of money and struggled to find artists willing to compete with Michelangelo’s spectacular new ceiling.
Thanks to his predecessors’ additions, Urban VIII moved into an impressive, imposing residence. But embroiled in dangerous alliances, he began fortifying the palace in 1625. The gardens were enclosed with high walls and a garden entrance on Via Pia was demolished; the Swiss Guards wing was secured along with the round tower at the entrance. Urban also increased the papal property by purchasing the adjoining D’Este estate.
In 1638, Urban commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to add a benediction loggia above the main portal. From here, Urban and his successors blessed worshipers gathered in the piazza below. Bernini encased the tall round arched opening with an aedicule, fronted by a balcony. Leading to the balcony was the small Precordium Room where the bodies of popes who died at the Quirinale were prepared for public display. As Louis Godart describes, part of the embalming process included removal of the precordium (the area over the heart), which was divided and placed in two metal containers and housed in the Cistercian Church of St. Vincent and St. Anastasio in Piazza di Trevi.3
In 1656, Bernini also redesigned the long Swiss Guard wing for Alexander VII’s court officials. Known as the manica lunga, it was completed in the first half of the eighteenth century by Innocent XIII and Clement XII. Benedict XIV added a coffee house for informal garden entertaining in 1741. After the Vatican became a museum in the eighteenth century, the popes retreated more to the Quirinale. The palace’s magnificent art collection was displayed under a gilded ceiling in the Salone dei Corazzieri.
It was onto the grounds of this historic compound that General Radet quietly entered. Urban VIII’s fortifications did not faze the French general, whose men came with ropes, ladders, and axes. All it took was a bribe to a former servant, fired for stealing, for the intruders to wind their way through the palace. Radet and his men waited until two A.M., when Pius VII turned out the light in his bed chamber and his guard stood down.
A month earlier, on June 10, cannons in Rome had announced the transfer of the Eternal City to French imperial rule. That day, Pius ordered the Bull of Excommunication against Napoleon posted on the doors of the city’s major basilicas. Napoleon wrote an angry letter to his brother Joseph, newly installed as king of Naples, calling Pius a “raving madman” who should be punished. “Philip the Fair arrested Boniface VIII, and Charles V kept Clement VII in prison; and they had done much less to deserve it,” he wrote.4
After overwhelming the fleeing Swiss guards, Radet arrested the frail sixty-seven-year-old pope and his closest adviser, Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca. Still, the break in did not go smoothly. In the course of entering through a window, some of the ladders fell, waking the Swiss Guards. As one of Pius’s servants rang an alarm bell, the French soldiers let their colleagues into the palace. The Swiss Guard abandoned the papal chambers and the troops ransacked the residence.5
Awakened by Cardinal Pacca, Pius quickly dressed in his white robes. With Cardinals Pacca and Antonio Despuig, he made his way to the public audience room and waited until the doors were broken down with an axe. Radet found Pius seated under a canopy. Just before being hauled off, Pius wrote a note: “When you are old you have to hold out your hands and let people take you where you do not want to go . . .”6
After a short conversation, Radet led Pius and Pacca out of the palace to a closed carriage outside. Given just minutes to pack, they quickly put breviaries, rosaries, and the Sacrament inside a ciborium. Pius must certainly have been struck by déjà vu. Eleven years earlier in February 1798, the French had kidnapped his predecessor from the Quirinale. Humiliated, moved from place to place, eighty-one-year-old Pius VI died in France in 1799 after a twenty-four-year pontificate. Pius
VII had attended his funeral in February 1802 when Napoleon finally allowed the pontiff’s body to be returned from Valence.
As he passed the Dioscuri group, Pius thought about his relative. Pius VI had repositioned the giant sculptures, turning them slightly inward. Between the works, he installed a fifty-foot-tall Egyptian obelisk discovered in the ruins of the Mausoleum of Augustus. As his carriage pulled away from the Quirinale, the pope focused on the view of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in the distance below. He’d been forced to move from the Vatican to the Quirinale in February 1808 when Napoleon’s General Miollis occupied Rome. Now he wondered if he would ever see St. Peter’s again.
When General Radet was asked how he felt arresting Pius, he recalled that it had been business as usual until he actually saw the pope. “At that moment,” he recalled, “my first communion flashed before my eyes!”7 Eighteen years earlier, in June 1791, Radet had tried to rescue Louis XVI when the king and his family were captured at Varennes.
The honeymoon between Napoleon and Pius VII was short. Their relationship had steadily deteriorated after the Concordat. The Organic Articles added after the fact left the Curia reeling. In addition to allowing divorce, the revisions gave Protestantism and Judaism equal status as Catholicism, and France’s new Consulate wound up with almost complete control over the Church in France. Rome never accepted decrees giving other religions equal standing. The feast of Saint Napoleon and the 1806 imperial catechism were never ratified.
In 1805, Napoleon gave Pius eight sumptuous New Testament tapestries woven at Gobelins in the mid-1700s, including The Tapestry of Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple and the Washing of the Feet. But later that year, the gift was forgotten.