by Susan Jaques
Concerned that the funeral of the famous Italian hero would spark unrest, Austrian officials imposed strict rules. Black, the color associated with the revolutionary Carbonari (literally the charcoal burners) was prohibited. Instead, Count Leopoldo Cigognara, president of the Venetian Academy, and his fellow mourners wore green, the color of the house of Savoy that had become a symbol for Italian unification.
On October 16, following a religious ceremony in St. Mark’s Basilica, the funeral procession moved to the Academy of Fine Arts. Draped with a black veil, Canova’s coffin was placed on a bier in the main hall before Titian’s massive altarpiece, The Assumption of the Virgin (1516–18). Canova called the twenty-three-foot-tall canvas from the high altar of the Frari the greatest painting in the world.30 While the apostles reach up toward Mary, she looks up toward God, her arms outstretched and supported by angels. Leopoldo Cigognara gave the moving funerary oration before Canova’s coffin.
On October 25, Canova was buried at Possagno’s old church. Funeral rites were also held in late January in Rome at the Church of the Holy Apostles, home to Canova’s funerary monument for Clement XIV and funeral stele for engraver Giovanni Volpato.
A decade later, Canova’s remains were moved to the west side of his neoclassical temple. Canova’s own painting The Deposition hung behind the main altar. Below the domed ceiling of carved and gilded rosettes was a floor made with red and white marble from the nearby Piave River. The sculptor’s sarcophagus was adorned with his coat of arms, the lyre of Orpheus and the snake of Eurydice chosen “in memory of his first statues.” As a teenager, Canova sculpted the famous mythological couple for the Asolo villa of his first patron, Senator Giovanni Falier.
Napoleon had expressed to Canova the prevailing notion that Italy’s artistic genius was over, with Canova a lone exception. Stendhal echoed this sentiment, writing that Canova “had emerged quite by chance out of the sheer inertia which this warm climate imposed, but he is a freak. Nobody else [in Italy] is the least like him.”31 But for Italians, Canova represented Italy’s enduring cultural supremacy.
Shortly after Canova’s death, his friend Antonio D’Este began a memoir, a counter to Missirini’s 1824 biography, Della vita di Antonio Canova. Published posthumously in Florence in 1864, Memorie di Antonio Canova was a portrait of the master and his studio practice.32 Quatremère de Quincy also wrote a biography of his lifelong friend. Tellingly he wrote this passage about Napoleon:
“Time, however has revealed to us that in him [Napoleon] there was still something other than the desire to entrust the portrait of himself to the most renowned talent of that time. This kind of ambition, since Alexander, has not been lacking in any celebrated man. But with Bonaparte, there was already the expectation of that universal conquest that was the object of his whole life. Hence his covetousness of everything there was in each country, whether masterpieces or precious objects, or men of talent and famous subjects. What follows will make better known, in regard to Canova, the extraordinary desire that he had to appropriate him, his works even less than his person.”33
In life, Canova achieved extraordinary fame as the greatest artist of the day. In death, he became a hero for Italian nationalism. Keats, Coleridge, Thomas Moore, the Brownings, and Byron were all fans. “Italy has great names,” wrote Byron in his preface to Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), “Canova, Monti, Ugo Foscolo . . . will secure to the present generation an honourable place . . . and in some the very highest: Europe—the World—has but one Canova.”34
Canova’s students modeled his Carrara marble cenotaph in the Frari after the sculptor’s own unrealized funerary monument for Titian (1795). In front of a pyramid, symbol of eternity, Sculpture leads the weeping figures of Painting and Architecture to the open tomb door. A youthful nude Genius reclines and the lion of St. Mark grieves (decades later, the Habsburgs ordered a pyramidal funerary monument for Titian, across the nave from Canova’s cenotaph).
A competition arose between Venice and Possagno over Canova’s body. In the end, Canova’s heart was placed in a porphyry vase inside the Frari cenotaph; his right hand was kept at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in the Palladian Tablino in an urn designed by Giuseppe Borsato. In 2008, when the Academy school changed its headquarters, the sculptor’s hand was transferred to the Canova Temple of Possagno. It is now in a gold and crystal sphere by his tomb. Canova’s stepbrother Giovanni Battista Sartori shares the tomb; their marble portrait busts flank the sarcophagi.
In the first volume of his history of sculpture dedicated to Napoleon in 1813, Cicognara wrote that Canova “had led modern art along the way of Greek sculpture.”35 Cicognara dedicated the final volume to Canova. About The Three Graces he wrote: “If statues could be made by stroking marble rather than by roughly cutting and chipping, I would say that this one had been formed by wearing down the surrounding marble by dint of kisses and caresses.”36
After seeing the marble version of Helen, Byron wrote On the bust of Helen by Canova in 1816. “In this beloved marble view/Above the works and thoughts of Man/What Nature could but would not, do/And Beauty and Canova can!/Beyond Imagination’s power/Beyond the Bard’s defeated art/With Immortality her dower/Behold the Helen of the heart.”37
After Canova’s death, European collectors continued to covet his cool, polished marbles. But starting with British critic John Ruskin, his distinctive neoclassical style fell out of favor. Italian art historian Roberto Longhi wrote about the “funereal blunders of Antonio Canova, the still-born sculptor whose heart is buried in the church of the Frari, whose hand is in the Accademia and the rest of him buried I know not where.”38 Today, Canova’s superstar reputation has been reestablished. Plaster casts of his masterworks, including Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker and The Three Graces are assembled in his Gipsoteca in Possagno.
France’s art plunder catapulted the Louvre from a “national museum to an encyclopedic sensation,” writes Noah Charney. Throughout, Dominique-Vivant Denon had been Napoleon’s “mastermind art hunter” and “architect of the art looting and assembly at the Louvre . . .”39
After his forced retirement as museum director, Denon turned his elegant apartment at 7 quai Voltaire into a private museum. His eclectic collection included Egyptian, Persian, and Roman antiquities, medieval, Renaissance, and Chinese works, medals, costumes, and furniture. Fittingly, the man responsible for Napoleon’s “reinvention of relics” assembled his own reliquary.40
In a fifteenth-century gilded copper reliquary shaped like a Gothic cathedral, Denon enshrined dozens of his own secular relics. Among them were a lock of Napoleon’s hair, a strip of the blood-stained shirt he wore when he died, and a leaf from the willow tree by his grave on St. Helena.41
One of the first artists to draw the temples and ruins of ancient Egypt, Denon now started an ambitious art history book. His goal was to link the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, Romans, Byzantium, Michelangelo, Titian, and finally to France’s contemporary painters.
Denon’s first job at Louis XV’s court was conservator of engraved gems. He returned from the Egyptian campaign with a large number of Roman copper medals, which he acquired from locals who had discovered them tending their fields and building houses near ancient ruins.42 After being made a knight of the empire by Napoleon in 1808, Denon picked a medal scale for his coat of arms that he kept when he was named a baron four years later.43 By the end of his life, Denon had amassed some three thousand medals.
Honoré de Balzac called Denon’s early erotic short story, Le Point de lendemain (No Tomorrow), a primer for married men. Denon himself never married. He met the love of his life, Isabella Teotochi, in Venice. The portrait he commissioned of her in Venice still hung his salon. A few days before his death, Denon wrote his former lover: “Your last letter was of a youth so graceful, that I believed on reading it that I was only twenty. I assure you that I was worthy of it, and I thank you for it with all my heart. Good-bye, dear friend, I embrace you with all my heart.”44
After attending an auction in April 1825, the seventy-eight-year-old fell ill and died. Joining his funeral cortege at Père Lachaise Cemetery was painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who called the powerful art figure “my anti-moi.” Peering into Denon’s grave, Ingres reportedly said “Good, and there he’ll stay.”45 Ingres soon replaced Denon at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (over four decades later in 1867, Ingres would also be buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery). To mark his tomb, Denon’s nephews commissioned a naturalistic, seated statue of their uncle in bronze from sculptor Pierre Cartellier. Denon’s beloved art collection was dispersed in a series of sales.
In 1803, Isabella Teotochi received a note from her former lover, expressing his emotional attachment to Napoleon: “It is rare to love much the grandest men but I assure you that the more I see this there, the more I love him. I feel happy that my final epoch of my life could be devoted to existence so distinguished. It is the burning star who revives my soul.”46
After the First Empire, the successful decades-long collaboration of Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine ended. Percier turned his attention to teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts. Among his students were sixteen Prix de Rome winners and seven members of the Institut de France. Percier also pursued his graphic work, organizing his voluminous drawings and producing ornamental compositions for books. Percier’s deep attachment to Italy continued. In a letter to Antonio Canova in Italian, probably from 1811, the architect wrote:
“The little free time I have left I want to devote to the study of the fine arts that I love so much and [I] will tell myself by way of encouragement: ‘work, you are almost Roman.’” Adding that he “brought back from Rome a number of drawings made after monuments and buildings there,” Percier confided that “Every night before going to bed I spent two hours finishing them and in doing so forgot all my other tasks, thinking only of the sweet memories of my happy days.”47
When Percier died in Paris on September 5, 1838, he left his drawing albums to his students and one hundred thousand francs to the École gratuite de dessin. Successors to Percier’s chair at the Institut de France continued to hand down his gold ring featuring an oval Carnelian intaglio created in the late first century or early second century. According to Jean-Philippe Garric, the portrait profile most likely represents Marciana, sister of Roman emperor Trajan. As a token of friendship, Julien-David Le Roy, member of the Royal Academy of Architecture, bequeathed the antique ring to the promising young Percier when he died in 1803.48
Beyond an expression of imperial propaganda, Percier’s innovative motifs had a lasting impact outside of France. Like England’s William Kent, Percier helped establish a new visual language, the Empire style. As Tom Stammers writes, Percier’s ideas were reproduced “in interiors from Charlottenburg in Berlin to Hampton House in Baltimore, from Rosendal Palace in Sweden to Capodimonte outside Naples.”49
The politically savvy Fontaine continued working during the Restoration, building the neoclassical Chapelle Expiatoire in Paris for Louis XVIII and the Palais Royal in Neuilly and other residences for Louis-Philippe. Fontaine finally retired with the Revolution of 1848. During the last five years of his life, he held the ceremonial post of president of the Conseil des bâtiments civils.50 Fontaine died at age ninety-one in October 1853. Per his wish, he was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, sharing the tomb he designed with both Charles Percier and Claude-Louis Bernier, their friend from Rome. Per Fontaine’s instructions, the tomb’s octagonal stele was engraved with the inscription “Hi tres in unum sunt,” these three are one.51
After the fall or death of a Roman emperor, his family was often wiped out. After Napoleon’s defeat, several members of the Bonaparte family took refuge in Rome, thanks to Pius VII. Madame Mère and her stepbrother Cardinal Fesch lived one floor apart at the Palazzo Falconieri, surrounded by his art collection.
In 1818, Napoleon’s mother moved to the Palazzo Rinuccini where her bedroom became a kind of shrine to the family’s past glory. With her vision failing, she was read Alexandre Dumas’s new play Napoleon Bonaparte and convinced herself that her son had escaped from St. Helena.52
Shortly before his death, Napoleon acknowledged her influence. “My excellent mother is a woman of courage and great talent, more of a masculine than feminine nature, proud and high minded . . .” he wrote. “To the manner in which she formed me at an early age, I principally owe my subsequent elevation.”53
The abduction of Pius VII put a strain on the relationship between Napoleon and his uncle. Stripped of duties as Grand Chaplain in 1809, Cardinal Fesch was sent into exile in Lyon in 1812. Welcomed to Rome by Pius, the Cardinal announced Napoleon’s death to his family in May 1821. Fesch died in 1839, three years after his sister. Napoleon’s nephew Louis Napoleon built a family funerary chapel on Ajaccio. The gold engraved inscription on Letizia Bonaparte’s black stone tomb reads Mater regum, mother of kings.54
Pauline Borghese proved the most loyal of Napoleon’s siblings. After selling her jewelry, she brought the cash to Elba, where she encouraged her brother to try to get his throne back. After Waterloo, Pauline was blamed for her husband’s sale of the Borghese antiquities to Napoleon. Thanks to Pius, Pauline continued to use the Palazzo Borghese while Camillo lived with his mistress. She also lived royally in Villa Paolina near the Porta Pia. After a long illness, Pauline died in June 1825 in Florence.
After Napoleon’s decisive defeat at Leipzig, the Murats went rogue, allying themselves with the Austrians in an attempt to hold onto power. About the duplicity, Napoleon wrote: “I was well aware that Murat was a fool, but I thought he loved me. It is his wife who is the cause of his desertion. To think that Caroline, my own sister, should betray me!” During the Hundred Days, Murat rallied back to his brother-in-law’s side.
Inspired by Napoleon’s escape from Elba, Murat attempted his own comeback in Naples. But backed by a small force, he was outmanned by the Austrians and English. After Waterloo, Murat left for Corsica hoping to stage a return to Italy. Instead, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Pizzo, Calabria. Days before Napoleon arrived at St. Helena, Murat reportedly told his firing squad: “Soldiers, respect the face and aim at the heart . . . Fire!”55
Following her husband’s execution, Caroline Murat and her four children were exiled in Trieste and Vienna. In 1830, she married Francesco Macdonald, former war minister of Naples. At the end of her life, she called herself the countess of Lipona, an anagram of Napoli. The couple moved to Florence where she died at age fifty-seven of stomach cancer in 1839.
Elisa Bonaparte left Florence to join Jérôme and his family in Trieste. In 1820, after inspecting excavations at Aquileia, the forty-three-year-old caught a fever and died. Though he was estranged from his powerful brother throughout his rule, Lucien Bonaparte supported him during the Hundred Days. Lucien died in Viterbo, Italy, in 1840.56 Joseph Bonaparte fled to New Jersey with his art collection and several pieces from the Spanish crown jewels. He died in Florence in 1844.
An avid art collector, Joseph Bonaparte hung the finest paintings in his apartments at the royal palace, the Palacio Real. By spring 1813, the Spanish Royal Collection was one of the finest in Europe. After learning that Wellington’s troops were again on the march into Spain (over one hundred thousand men, double the number of French troops in Spain), Joseph fled north with his treasure, ordering everything valuable packed and loaded. Within days, Spain’s cultural patrimony filled one-hundred-plus wagons.
More than 150 of Joseph’s favorite paintings from the Palacio Real had not been packed. Joseph ordered the pictures removed from their frames, cut from their stretchers, and rolled. They were added to his personal baggage, atop his coach. Many more valuable personal items were loaded into the boot of the coach, or into large trunks strapped to the outside. On May 26, 1813, Joseph, his own contingent of soldiers, and his baggage train began north, under the command of Victor Hugo’s father, General Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo. The paintings wound up with Wellin
gton, installed in his London residence, Apsley House.
After commanding a division at Waterloo, Napoleon’s youngest brother Jérôme lived for stints in Trieste, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1847, he returned to France where he became Governor of Les Invalides, a marshal of France, and president of the Senate before his death in 1860.57 Eugène de Beauharnais left Italy for Munich where his father-in-law Maximilian I made him duke of Leuchtenberg and prince of Eichstadt. The widowed Eugène died there in 1824 at age forty-three. His oldest child became queen consort to Sweden’s Oscar I; his youngest married the daughter of Russian tsar Nicholas I.
When Napoleon forced him to abdicate as king of Holland, Louis Bonaparte lived in Bohemia, Austria, and Switzerland where he died in 1846. Separated from her husband, Hortense de Beauharnais secretly gave birth to a son in 1811 (the 1st Duc de Morny), fathered by her lover the Comte de Flahaut, rumored to be Talleyrand’s illegitimate son. Hortense bought the Arenenberg Castle on Lake Constance, Switzerland where she died at age fifty-four in 1837. She is buried in the Church of Saint Pierre and Saint Paul in Rueil-Malmaison by her mother Joséphine.
Renamed the duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon’s son was raised by his Habsburg relatives at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace. From St. Helena, Napoleon received no news of the boy, who he had last seen at age three. The former king of Rome was not even allowed to visit his mother in Parma and only learned in 1829 that he had two stepsiblings from her liaison with Austrian general Adam Albert von Neipperg, who she married after Napoleon’s death. Widowed again in 1829, Marie Louise married the Grand Master of her court, French Count Charles de Bombelles. In 1832, she was at her son’s side when the twenty-one-year-old died at Schönbrunn Palace of tuberculosis. Fifteen years later, Marie Louise was buried at Vienna’s Capuchin Church beside her son and father.