The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

  A week later, Denon resigned as museum director, citing his advancing age (sixty-eight) and failing health.16 Still he remained defiant: “Let them take them then, but they have no eyes to see them with: France will always prove her superiority in the arts that the masterpieces were better here than elsewhere.”17

  Canova secured the restitution of 294 statues taken from Rome’s Villa Albani. But Cardinal Giuseppe Albani considered the cost of transporting his family’s antiquities back to Rome prohibitive. He sold several objects to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, including the Laughing Faun (today at the Glyptothek, Munich). The Antinous bas-relief from Hadrian’s Villa was returned to the Villa Albani, reinstalled in the salon to the left of the main gallery.18

  After being taken to Paris in 1807, Rome’s storied Giustiniani collection was dispersed. Now Prussia’s Frederick William III bought about one hundred sixty of the paintings (today in various museums in Berlin and Potsdam). The Carpegna collection stayed in France. The Braschis had been already compensated in 1802 for their art. Napoleon’s brother-in-law Camillo Borghese was unsuccessful in annulling the sale of his family’s antiquities. Several hundred Borghese pieces stayed in Paris, including the Gladiator, the Hermaphrodite, and a group of outstanding Roman sarcophagi.

  Outside the Louvre, Parisians could only watch. Canova drew up detailed notes of all the objects taken from the museum, including the day of their collection. Works were divided by their final destination in Rome or the Papal States. Canova spent his last weeks in Paris organizing logistics for the art convoys. England provided two convoys, a British frigate, and 35,000 pounds to pay for packing and transporting art from Paris to Italy.19 Canova hired the firm Larcher Becquemis to handle the transport. Canova’s tenacity led one contemporary to call the modest sculptor the “greediest of claimants.”20

  Ultimately Canova managed to get back seventy-seven of the original hundred papal works taken under the Treaty of Tolentino.21 On October 16, Canova wrote: “The cause of the Fine Arts is at length safe in port . . . we are at last beginning to drag forth from this great cavern of stolen goods the precious objects of art stolen from Rome . . . yesterday the Dying Gladiator left his French abode and the [Belvedere] Torso. We removed today the two first statues of the world, the Apollo [Belvedere] and the Laocoön . . . the most valuable of the statues are to go off by land, accompanied by the celebrated Venetian horses.”

  The first convoy left Paris by land on October 25 with Raphael’s Transfiguration, and Madonna of Foligno, Caravaggio’s Deposition, Apollo Belvedere, Belvedere Torso, and the Laocoön. The convoy was escorted by Austrian soldiers as far as the frontier of the Papal States. On the afternoon of November 23, while crossing the Mont Cenis Pass, a heavy sledge skidded on icy snow. The crate carrying the Laocoön fell from the wagon and crashed on the ice, damaging the famous marble group. The convoy of masterpieces finally reached Rome on January 4, 1816, entering the city through the Porta Angelica.22

  Alessandro D’Este supervised the shipment of the remaining art. Sculptures, including the colossal Nile, went by sea. In mid-November, crates of art were loaded onto fifteen wagons and left for Antwerp. The following May, the British naval vessel Abundance lent by the Prince Regent left for Civitavecchia. Works were transferred to Rome in July and August. In thanks for his support, Pius sent a gift for the future king on the ship—a circular tempietto of rosso antico topped by a statue of peace with plaster casts of works returned to Rome.23

  The world’s most prestigious museum was dismantled, with nearly five thousand objects returned. Denon wrote pessimistically: “Such an assembly—this comparison of the achievements of the human mind through the centuries, this tribunal where talent was constantly being judged by talent—in a word, this light which sprang perpetually from the inter-reaction of merits of all kinds has just been extinguished, and will never shine again.”24

  Yet France’s network of twenty-two provincial museums made it nearly impossible to track the location of hundreds of other paintings dispersed by Denon. Thanks to Denon, paintings like Veronese’s Marriage of Saint Catherine and Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi from Munich stayed in the cities of Rouen and Lyon, respectively. Looted art also hung at the Brera in Milan, the Accademia in Venice, and Napoleon’s imperial palaces, including the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, the Trianon, and Meudon.25

  Some of the Musée Royale’s pictures escaped repatriation because they were supposedly being restored; others were said to be inaccessible or lost.26 Prussia’s Frederick William III caved in after Denon argued that removing the ancient marble columns from Charlemagne’s Aachen Cathedral would cause the roof of the Louvre to collapse.

  In the end, writes Andrew McLellan, roughly half of the stolen art remained in France due to “a combination of diplomacy, bureaucratic obstruction, and the inability of weak nations to reclaim what was theirs.”27 Along with these works, the museum retained its royal collections, confiscated Church treasures, and artworks left behind by those fleeing revolutionary France. Denon managed to keep two masterpieces—Tintoretto’s Paradise from Verona and Veronese’s Wedding at Cana from San Giorgio Maggiore.

  As a result of the Congress of Vienna, Venice reverted to Austria, rendering its confiscated art in Paris Austrian property. Denon sent the Wedding at Cana off to a workshop in the provinces for restoration, delaying compliance with Austria’s restoration order. After Denon argued that the painting was too big and fragile to travel to Venice, Austrian commissioners agreed to trade the Veronese for Charles Le Brun’s lesser work, Feast in the House of Simon. Over the strong protests of Canova, this exchange was executed. One of the largest paintings at the Louvre, the Wedding at Cana hangs today across from Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

  Another loss was Titian’s The Crowning with Thorns (1542–43), commissioned as an altarpiece by Milan’s Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (the refectory is home to Leonardo’s Last Supper). The violent scene, the first of the artist’s two versions, was taken to Paris after Napoleon’s 1797 conquest of Milan. The canvas evokes two famed antiquities also taken to Paris. The figure of Christ appears to be modeled after the Laocoön; the upper body of Christ’s torturer on the left by the Belvedere Torso. The bust of Tiberius Caesar in the background refers to the Roman authorities who condemned Christ.

  The Italian “primitives” were so little understood, they were not returned and became part of the Louvre’s Italian art collection. Among the works that remained in France were paintings by Pietro Perugino. Considered a less significant artist at the time than he is now, many were deemed unsuitable for the Louvre and sent to various provincial museums. Perugino’s Marriage of the Virgin, considered one of his most important works, remains on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caen, northwestern France.

  When Canova returned to Rome, doubts arose about his effort. Of 506 pictures taken to France, only 249 were recovered, 248 stayed in France, and nine were declared missing.28 But in Canova’s defense, Pius allowed many paintings to stay in Paris and gave Louis XVIII a number of sculptures. He did not want to antagonize the restored Bourbons who seemed to be reversing two decades of anticlericalism. The sculptures included Seated Demosthenes, Curule Chair, Seated Trajan, Sphinx of red granite, white marble Altar, Tripod of Apollo, Tiberius in a toga, three candelabra, colossal figure of Melpomene (from the courtyard of the Palazzo della Cancelleria), a chair of rosso antico, and Caesar Augustus in consular dress.29 The Nile was returned despite French efforts to retain it, but the colossal Tiber also remained in Paris, along with the Sarcophagus of the Muses.

  In parallel with Canova, Abbot Marino Marini was sent to Paris to retrieve material seized from the Vatican Library in 1798 and 1799, including the archives and contents of the Medalgliere, or Medal Cabinet. When the archives of the Roman Curia were toted off to Paris by Napoleon, Marini’s uncle Luigi Gaetano Marini accompanied them, reaching Paris on April 11, 1810.30 In 1800, newly elected Pius VII had appointed Gaetano Marini primus custos of the Vatican
Library and prefect of the archives. In 1805, he was made a cameriere d’onore to the pope.

  After Napoleon’s fall, the count of Artois, vice-regent and the king’s brother, issued a decree directing the restitution to the Holy See of the archives, of all documents and manuscripts, and of several other collections. On April 28, the papal commissioners, Mgr. de Gregorio, Mgr. Gaetano Marini, and his nephew Marino Marini took charge of this property. Before it reached Rome, Gaetano Marini died in Paris in May 1815. Without a complete inventory of the numismatic collections, Marino Marini disappointedly accepted the same number of coins, but not the same objects. Manuscripts were returned, including the celebrated Codex B, the Virgil, and Terence codices. France kept medals and cameos from the Vatican Medalgliere.

  Marini filled sixteen cases with the treasures of the pontifical chapel, including miters the queen of Etruria gave the pope when he passed through Florence, and the tiara Napoleon gave Pius after his coronation. But the archives proved more difficult. According to Maria Luisa Ambrosini, documents had been stolen, sold, and removed. A large quantity of papers deemed unimportant were sold by weight in Paris in 1816 for wrapping paper and making cardboard. Marini found several hundred volumes of the registers of the bulls of the Apostolic Datary in the butcher shops of Paris.31 The journey back to Rome also proved challenging. The first wagons, loaded with priceless objects, were left standing unguarded throughout the night in Turin. During the crossing of the Taro River, Marini had to act fast to prevent the archival material from suffering water damage. He saved some seven hundred cases of papers by having them removed from the wagons and taken across the river by boat.32

  Back in Rome, the recovered objects along with the Vitali collection and the small “Roman” nucleus from excavations was arranged in the Chapel of St. Pius V, next to the library, in old cabinets. An inventory was prepared by Giuseppe Baldi, son of Elia, and Bartolomeo Borghesi. Baldi rebuilt the Vatican’s medal collection with the support of Pius VII’s art acquisition commission whose members included Canova, Filippo Aurelio Visconti, Carlo Fea, and Bertel Thorvaldsen.33

  While Canova worked for the pope, the Austrians managed the return of stolen works from Milan, Venice, Parma, Piacenza, and Florence. Parma’s art recovery was supervised by diplomat Giuseppe Poggi, under the protection of Austria’s emperor, father of Marie Louise, the duchy’s new ruler. Only a fraction of the fifty-three paintings were returned, but the masterly Correggios including La Madonna di San Gerolamo were recovered for Venice’s reorganized Galleria dell’Accademia. Paintings taken from Piacenza and from churches of Parma were not returned to their original locations.34

  One big convoy was organized for works intended for Italy.35 On October 24, 1815, forty-one wagons pulled by two hundred horses left Paris escorted by two squadrons of German Uhlans for Milan through Mont Cenis. In Milan, the cargo was sorted and sent to other destinations.36 The Russians under diplomat Karl Robert Nesselrode refused to budge over art repatriation. Alexander I had a vested interest in the situation. In October 1815, just as Napoleon was arriving at St. Helena, the frigate Archipelago arrived in Russia with thirty-eight paintings and four Canova sculptures from Malmaison. Alexander had bought the artworks from Joséphine’s children for 940,000 francs. He hung the paintings in the new Malmaison Hall of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

  Twenty-one of the paintings came from the 1806 French confiscation of the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel’s collection including four Claudes and Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross. (In 1829, Alexander’s youngest brother Nicholas I would buy another thirty of Joséphine’s paintings from Hortense.37 ) Since 1918, when the Bolshevik government signed a peace treaty with Germany and Austria, German negotiators have demanded the return of the stolen paintings. The pictures remain in the Hermitage.

  On September 25, the aide-de-camp of the prince of Schwarzenberg, commander of the Austrian troops, informed Denon that the Arc du Carrousel was to be dismantled. The bronze horses of St. Mark’s had starred in the July 1798 Fête de la Liberté. Denon argued that as a public monument, the arch fell outside the restitution agreements.

  Two days later, Austrian troops closed off all the streets leading to the Arc du Carrousel and the Tuileries, dispersing protesters. To the indignation of the French, the Prussians climbed Percier and Fontaine’s marble arch and took down the famous bronze horses. Louis XVIII reportedly observed the scene from a window at the Tuileries Palace.

  The London Courier published this eyewitness account: “I just now find that the Austrians are taking down the bronze horses from the Arch. The whole court of the Tuileries, and the Place du Carrousel are filled with Austrian infantry and cavalry under arms; no person is allowed to approach; the troops on guard amount to several thousands; there are crowds of French in all the avenues leading to it who give vent to their feelings by shouts and execrations . . . the number of cannons of the bridges has been increased.”

  It took an entire day to get two of the horses down from the top of the arch. English engineers were seen cavorting in the chariot. Rumors spread that English soldiers had scraped the gilding off the horses (in fact, the scoring was purposefully done in antiquity). By October 1, all four steeds were removed; Victory, Peace, and the chariot lay on the ground in pieces. Four gray horse replicas would replace the originals.

  The day after the bronze horses were removed, a writer for the London Courier reported that “The public mind of Paris still continues in a state of extreme agitation; the public appear every day more and more exasperated against the Allies. . . . The stripping of the Louvre is the chief cause of public irritation at present . . . the Grand Galerie of the Museum presents the strongest possible image of desolation; here and there a few pictures giving greater effect to the disfigured nakedness of the walls.

  “I have seen several French ladies in passing along the galleries suddenly break into extravagant fits of rage and lamentation; they gather round the Apollo [Belvedere] to take their last farewell with the most romantic enthusiasm; there is so much passion in their looks, their language and their sighs, in the presence of this monument of human genius that a person unacquainted with their character or accustomed to study the character of the fair sex in England, where feeling is controlled by perpetual discipline, would be disposed to pronounce them literally mad . . .”38

  On October 12, artist Andrew Robertson reported from Paris: “The Louvre is truly doleful to look at now, all the best statues are gone, and half the rest; the place full of dust, ropes, triangles, and pulleys.” His colleague Thomas Lawrence lamented “the breaking up of a collection in a place so centrical to Europe, where everything was laid open to the public with a degree of liberality unknown elsewhere.”39

  Stendhal summed up his compatriots’ bitterness. “The allies have taken from us 1,150 pictures. I hope that I am allowed to note that we acquired the best of them by a treaty, that of Tolentino. . . . The allies, on the other hand, took our pictures from us without a treaty.”40

  Before Venice’s bronze horses left Paris on October 17, Austria’s Francis I asked Canova where they should be installed. The sculptor suggested that pairs of the horses could flank the main entrance to the doge’s Palace, directly across from Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore. But Count Leopoldo Cicognara, president of Venetian Academy, disagreed. Cicognara insisted the icon be returned to its original home, the façade of St. Mark’s Basilica (to protect the ancient horses after a restoration, they were reinstalled inside the Basilica in 1982, replaced by replicas outside).

  After arriving in Venice on December 7, the bronze horses crossed the lagoon by raft and were taken to the Arsenale for repair. At some point, the decoration on their collars was lost. The bronze lion from the column on the Piazzetta was also returned, but required extensive repairs after being smashed into dozens of pieces during its removal in Paris. The following April, the lion was reinstalled atop its column.41

  On December 13, the eighteenth anniversary of the horses’ confiscation, a
raft with Austrian and Venetian standards came around the eastern end of Venice carrying the famous bronzes. With Francis I in attendance, Academy president Cicognara addressed the crowd. To musket shots and cannon fire, the horses were lifted and repositioned at their place on the Basilica’s loggia.42

  TWO

  EXILES AND HEROES

  With the Allies in France, Napoleon ordered Pius moved back to the northern Italian port town of Savona where he was released two months later. Resistance to Napoleon turned the aging pontiff into a heroic figure. Parallels were made between the end of his captivity and Saint Peter’s freedom from a Jerusalem prison.1 From St. Helena, Napoleon would write of his adversary, “Alexander the Great declared himself the son of Jupiter, and in my time I have met a priest more powerful than I.”

  For centuries, the papal coronation ceremony known as the possesso had followed the imperial Roman triumphal route through the Forum to the Capitol in reverse. Temporary arches were erected on the Campidoglio and in the Forum near the Arch of Titus and the Farnese Gardens. But with Pius VII’s election in Venice, the tradition had ended. On May 24, 1814, nearly halfway into his fifteenth year as pope, Pius finally enjoyed a triumphal entry into Rome. The celebration lasted two days.

  From the Via Flaminia, the papal procession continued to the Piazza del Popolo and Church of Santa Maria where a large, emotional crowd gathered. Ephemeral monuments inspired by ancient Rome and the Renaissance celebrated Pius’s return. Among the structures designed by Giuseppe Valadier was an arch for the Piazza Venezia. A neoclassical commemorative column on the Ponte S. Angelo depicting the Triumph of Constancy featured a figure carved by Bertel Thorvaldsen.

  To help the crowds navigate from the Piazza del Popolo to St. Peter’s, a bridge supported by boats was erected over the Tiber after the Renaissance invention of the triumphal bridge, or Pons Triumphalis.2 The pope’s coach was unhitched from the horses. Some five dozen young men in powdered wigs pulled his coach through a series of laurel arches to St. Peter’s and then up to the Palazzo Quirinale where he’d been abducted.3