by Susan Jaques
THREE
RES GESTAE
For the ancient Egyptians, a name was everything. Obliterating a person’s name was the equivalent of destroying that person’s hope for an afterlife. In the fifteenth century B.C.E., the female pharaoh Hatshepsut ruled for some two decades. Her prosperous reign was remarkable for a building spree that included a mortuary temple complex (the future site for the Valley of the Kings). After Hatsheput’s death, she was targeted either by her stepson Thutmose III or his son Amenhotep II. Public references to her as king disappeared from reliefs, statues, cartouches, and the official list of Egyptian rulers.
About a century and a half later, when military commander Horemheb became pharaoh, he ordered the cartouches of the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten and his eighteenth-dynasty successors like Tutankhamun defaced. The husband of Nefertiti, Akhenaten established a new cult dedicated to the Aton, the sun’s disk. He himself erased the name and image of the rival Theban god Amon from Egypt’s monuments. In the fourth century B.C.E., a notoriety-seeking Greek named Herostratus set fire to Ephesus’s Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of antiquity. Under penalty of death, the arsonist’s name could never be repeated.
The Romans, familiar with both Egyptian and Hellenistic cultures, adopted this severe dishonor that later came to be known by the Latin term, damnatio memoriae, or damnation of memory. “Like the Greeks before them, Romans also traveled to the East and especially to Egypt, where the grandeur and antiquity of pharaonic civilization conveyed its own messages about memory and monuments over a much longer time span . . . it would have been virtually impossible for individual elite Romans not to bring home new ideas about memory and erasure, interpreted within their own frames of reference,” writes Harriet Flower.1
In Republican Rome, sanctions limited or destroyed the memory of citizens deemed unworthy members of the community. The practice continued to evolve throughout the Republic and Empire, with names scratched from inscriptions, faces chiseled off statues, images on frescoes overpainted, coins defaced, and wills annulled.2 According to Flower, Augustus introduced a less punitive type of memory sanction, epitomized by his treatment of his defeated rival Mark Antony who had been attacked by the senate after Actium.3
During major regime changes, the violent transitions between dynasties, deposed emperors were subject to memory sanctions of varying degrees. Rome’s most notorious imperators, Nero, Domitian, and Commodus, were declared enemies of the state. Following the 96 C.E. assassination of Domitian, the dictatorial younger brother of Titus and son of Vespasian, Suetonius writes that his images were “torn down . . . and dashed upon the ground;” the senate ordered his inscriptions erased and “all record of him obliterated.”4
Suetonius also tells us that after Caligula’s assassination in 41 C.E., “some wanted all memory of the Caesars obliterated, and their temples destroyed.” The sadistic emperor was spared from a damnatio morae by his successor Claudius, though his coinage was melted down. During the late imperial period, damnatio memoriae continued to be the ultimate disgrace. In the early fourth century, Diocletian reportedly was so upset by the condemnation of his co-ruler Maximian that he died shortly after.5
Though damnatio memoriae was meant to punish emperors who discredited Rome, the practice was also abused, as in ancient Egypt. On his deathbed in 211, Septimius Severus instructed his sons and co-heirs Geta and Caracalla to get along with each other. Instead, Caracalla murdered Geta and issued a damnatio memoriae against his slain brother. After the fratricide, Caracalla erased Geta’s name from the inscription on the attic of their father’s triumphal arch, and removed his face from the family portrait, the Severan Tondo.
Defaced sculptures and reliefs were often repurposed with images of the new emperor. Nerva, for example, reused the defaced stone statues of Domitian. Rather than melting down Nero’s one-hundred-foot-tall bronze Colossus, Vespasian, founder of the new Flavian dynasty, changed it into the sun god with a crown of rays. Hadrian moved the giant statue from the entrance of Nero’s Golden House, reportedly with twenty-four elephants. Commodus later turned it into a self-portrait, adding the attributes of Hercules, a club, and lion skin. After Commodus’s fall, the statue reverted to a sun god.
Despite the many alterations to his statue, Nero wasn’t forgotten, posits Mary Beard. “It was always the statue that once had been Nero. . . . The line drawn in the Roman world between the destruction and preservation of images of emperors, between remembering and forgetting them, destruction or partial destruction was a very powerful strategy of memorialization. It wasn’t always and it certainly wasn’t necessarily about forgetting.”6 Eventually destroyed, the Colossus lent its name to the Colosseum.
The practice of memory sanctions continued through the centuries. During the French Revolution, a kind of damnatio memoriae was imposed on the despised Bourbon monarchs. Statues of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI were razed; the royal necropolis at Saint Denis was desecrated. One of Louis XVIII’s first acts as king was to transfer the remains of his guillotined brother Louis XVI and sister-in-law Marie Antoinette to Saint Denis and commission praying statues of the couple. He also ordered fragments from some 158 royal bodies removed from the mass graves and placed into an ossuary in Saint Denis’s crypt.
Aware that Louis XVIII would try to erase the memory of his reign, Napoleon wrote from St. Helena on December 9, 1815: “I am so closely identified with our prodigious deeds, our monuments, our institutions, in short, all of our nation’s acts, that I can never be removed from them without harming France; her glory is to confess my name. And whatever sophism, whatever circumlocution, whatever lie they may employ to prove the opposite, they cannot alter the fact that I will remain all this in the eyes of that nation.”
After the One Hundred Days and Waterloo, Louis XVIII tried to reestablish the Bourbon dynasty’s political legitimacy amid widespread fear that France was reverting to the ancien régime. Restoration authorities embarked on a smear campaign, depicting Napoleon as a Corsican ogre and devil. But as Sudhir Hazareesingh notes, the effort to vilify Napoleon was unsuccessful, hurt by a battered economy and the continued presence of Allied troops.7
If anything, Napoleon’s legend grew stronger. “. . . despite Waterloo, the events of 1815 resurrected the myth of the Napoleonic Prometheus, of the glorious man who could succeed against all odds and defy the political and physical laws of the universe,” writes Hazareesingh.8 Between 1816 and 1825, rumors persisted that Napoleon would pull off another herculean escape and raise a vast army like those of Alexander or Caesar.
March, the month of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, took on “almost mystical properties.”9 A clandestine cottage industry sprung up of Napoleonic memorabilia in the form of coins and medals, statuettes, and portraits. In addition to Napoleon, commemorative coins featured dynastic images of family members Marie Louise, Napoleon II, Joséphine, and Eugène de Beauharnais. Saint Napoleon not only remained a French tradition, it grew stronger. “. . . observance of this tradition intensified after the death of the emperor and his mortal remains’ subsequent (though not immediate) return to France,” writes Fiona Parr. “Celebrated by various groups of Bonaparte sympathizers, it was a day in the year for the emperor’s admirers to come together and honour his life and death.”10
Like the Romans’ damnatio memoriae, Louis XVIII instigated a nationwide purge of objects to erase the public memory of Napoleon. For starters, Lorenzo Bartolini’s colossal bronze bust of Napoleon at the entrance of the Louvre was replaced with a bust of the Bourbon king. In 1815, Napoleon’s coronation and wedding carriage was cut up “as a loathsome relic of Bonaparte.”11 Ironically in 1794, the National Convention ordered the destruction of Louis XVI’s coronation carriage. Painter Jacques-Louis David was allowed to scratch the panel paintings destined for the fire with the tip of his penknife. From the top of the Vendôme Column, Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s monumental statue of Napoleon crowned with a laurel wreath was replaced by a fleur-de-lys flag.
In 1819, Louis XVIII had Napoleon’s spectacular coronation crown with its dozens of gold leaves melted down. Empire-inspired reliefs from Napoleon’s Arc du Carrousel were removed, with the intention of replacing them with scenes from the Duc d’Angoulême’s Spanish campaign of 1823. In 1828, a new bronze chariot and horses by François Joseph Bosio were installed on top of the arch, replacing the famous horses returned to St. Mark’s Basilica. At the French Academy in Rome, Louis XVIII’s head was added to a statue that began as Napoleon.
On August 21, 1815, Louis XVIII ordered Vivant Denon to “make all the paintings with the effigy of Bonaparte disappear from the royal palaces and houses.”12 The city of Orléans publicly burnt François Gérard’s portrait of Napoleon. Sculptures of Napoleon were also targeted. In Maine-et-Loire, Antonio Canova’s marble portrait bust of Napoleon was saved from destruction in 1816 by an official who hid it in an attic.13 The same year, Louis XVIII sold Canova’s monumental Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker to the British government.
Canova had tried to buy back his sculpture while negotiating for Rome’s artworks in Paris, but Denon demanded the Vatican’s Nile in exchange. On behalf of the British government, William Richard Hamilton negotiated a price of 66,000 francs or 3,000 pounds sterling with the French government.
Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker left Paris on April 1, 1816. Hamilton wrote Canova on July 15 to let him know that the work had arrived safely in London. In September, Hamilton wrote the sculptor again, to dispel a rumor about the statue being a gift for the Prince Regent. According to Hamilton, the marble was always intended for the Duke of Wellington.14
The work was initially stored in the Duke of Richmond’s gardens, the former privy gardens of Whitehall Palace. This was also where the Elgin Marbles were first kept after arriving from Athens a few years earlier.15 In 1817, the year after buying Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner from his brother, the Duke of Wellington commissioned Canova’s friend, sculptor John Flaxman, to install Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker. According to Flaxman, it took six men twelve days to position the thirteen-ton marble at the base of a Robert Adam designed staircase. To support the tremendous weight, the floor had to be strengthened by adding a brick pier to the basement below (in 1828, the staircase was redesigned and extended to the third floor).16
According to Susan Jenkins, critics thought that the placement of Napoleon’s statue in the stairwell of Apsley House was a conscious slight by Wellington to his archnemesis. But as it turns out, the staircase was the residence’s central location at the time. “Napoleon’s place at the heart of Wellington’s house reflects his importance as the indirect architect of Wellington’s fortunes,” writes Jenkins.17 When asked to name the greatest captain of the age, Wellington replied: “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”18
Starting in 1820, Wellington hosted an annual celebratory Waterloo Banquet in the dining room of Apsley House. George IV and other A-list guests dined on the Prussian service, a gift from Frederick William III. Between 1829 and Wellington’s death in 1852, the banquet moved to the ninety-foot-long Waterloo Gallery.
Louis XVIII presented Wellington with a souvenir from Napoleon’s One Hundred Days—embroidered flags of the French departments paraded on the Champ de Mars in June 1815. In 1818, Louis also gave the British war hero a spectacular Sèvres Egyptian-style service commissioned by Napoleon for Joséphine. To complement Canova’s colossal marble of Napoleon, Wellington assembled painted portraits of the emperor and family members, including Joséphine and siblings Joseph and Pauline Bonaparte.
Ironically, another highly symbolic artwork ordered by Napoleon wound up in the hands of his enemy. In May 1817, the Sèvres Commander’s Table arrived at London’s Carlton House, a gift from Louis XVIII. “Is there anything more amiable in the world? Yes, assuredly I accept with warmest gratitude this testimony of the king’s goodness, and I shall devote myself to it all my life,” said the delighted Prince Regent.19 The prestigious table featuring a central image of Alexander the Great surrounded by celebrated commanders of antiquity became one of George IV’s most treasured possessions. For his coronation and state portraits, the king insisted on being depicted standing next to the table.
George IV’s artistic taste was formed after the French Revolution when paintings and furniture from French aristocratic collections flooded London. As Prince of Wales, he took full advantage of the market, snatching up Dutch and Flemish paintings, including pictures by Rembrandt, Cuyp, and de Hooch. Among the magnificent French furniture adorning Buckingham Palace’s state rooms was a writing desk by Jean-Henri Riesener, supplier to the French court. George also commissioned art. To celebrate Napoleon’s defeat, he hired Thomas Lawrence to produce a series of battlefield portraits for Windsor’s new Waterloo Chamber.
In 1824, Louis XVIII died and was succeeded by his younger brother Charles X. Except for Napoleon’s Hundred Days, he had ruled for a decade. He would be the last king to be buried at Saint Denis. Despite the Bourbon effort to expunge Napoleon’s memory, he remained woven into the very fabric of the capital. An imperial cult arose with new symbols and images. Like Julius Caesar after his assassination, France’s authoritarian emperor was recast in exile and death as a defender of revolutionary principles and a symbol of patriotism. Throughout France, Napoleon’s birthday and Saint Napoleon’s day continued to be celebrated as an anti-royalist gesture.
Though many Napoleonic artworks were destroyed, some valuable objects were just too beautiful and valuable. Like the Colossus of Nero reworked by his successors, some of Napoleon’s commissions were physically altered to remove references to the emperor. This was the case with the Table of the Imperial Palaces, the last of the Sèvres gueridons ordered in January 1811. On the green porcelain table top, landscape painter Jean-François Robert created nine panels representing palaces tied to Napoleon including the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, Rambouillet, and Compiègne.
According to Gillian Arthur, the table was “de-Napoleonized” and “Bourbonized” during the Restoration. The features of Napoleon in a hunting costume with his family were replaced by those of Louis XVIII’s son, the duc de Berry. Paintings of Versailles, St. Germain, and Meudon replaced three of Napoleon’s palaces; Bourbon fleurs-de-lys were subbed for Napoleonic eagles.20 Completed in April 1817, the table was presented eight years later by Charles X to Francis I, king of the Two Sicilies, the father-in-law of his assassinated son.21
From St. Helena, Napoleon wrote prophetically that “. . . sooner or later a volcanic eruption would engulf the throne, its surroundings and its followers.” That eruption came in 1830, when Charles X was ousted in the July Revolution. During the Paris insurrection, many participants shouted “Long Live Napoleon!” and “Long Live Napoleon II!”22 Following Charles’s abdication, the Duc d’Orléans was named King Louis-Philippe. A cousin of Louis XVI whose father was killed during the French Revolution, Louis-Philippe faced a sharply divided France.
A year before Augustus’s death on August 9, 14 C.E., he deposited four documents for safekeeping with the Vestal Virgins. These included his will, funeral instructions, a balance sheet of Rome’s financial and military readiness, and a detailed, biased account of his achievements, known as the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, or the Deeds of the Divine Augustus.
After Augustus’s death, the senate decreed he should be divinized. His will was read aloud and per his wishes, the Res Gestae was inscribed on a pair of bronze pillars placed in front of his mausoleum. It’s believed that Augustus penned the first-person résumé years before his death and that Tiberius made some later edits.23
A brief introduction was followed by thirty-five paragraphs organized in four sections plus a third-person posthumous addendum. Section one details Augustus’s political career; section two his public benefactions, donations of money, land and grain to the citizens of Italy and his soldiers, along with the public works and gladiator contests he ordered. Section three describes Augustus’s military feats and alliances.
The finale reads: “In my thirteenth consulship [2 B.C.E.] the senate, the equestrian order and the whole people of Rome gave me the title of Father of my Country, resolved that this should be inscribed in the porch of my house and in the Curia Julia and in the Forum Augustum below the chariot which had been set there in my honour by decree of the Senate. At the time of writing I am in my seventy-sixth year.”24
Interestingly, Augustus’s opponents remain nameless throughout the document. Marc Antony is a “faction,” Brutus and Cassius are “enemies of Rome,” and Sextus Pompeius is implied to be a “pirate.”25 The appendix details Augustus’s building spree, recording that the emperor spent six hundred million silver denarii (six hundred thousand gold denarii) from his own money on public works.
Augustus’s funerary inscription proved to be an effective form of propaganda, immortalizing his reign and and serving as a monument to his Julio-Claudian successors. Though the original Res Gestae was lost, many copies were carved in stone on monuments and temples across the Empire. Almost a full copy written in the original Latin with a Greek translation was preserved on a temple to Roma and Augustus in Ankara (today’s Turkey). Several other copies have been found in Asia Minor.
Like the mausoleum of Augustus, writes Valérie Huet, Trajan’s columnar funerary monument along with the rest of his Forum functioned as his res gestae.26 Trajan’s literal res gestae was housed in the library flanking the column. Trajan outdid Augustus by also immortalizing his military actions in the marble reliefs of his column. As Huet puts it, the Austerlitz Column was Napoleon’s res gestae, documenting his greatest military achievements.27 Unlike Trajan’s Column, the Austerlitz Column would not be Napoleon’s funeral monument.