No sculpture had been mentioned in the ultimatum and it was only after the commissioners left, on 13 December, that the four horses were lowered from their platform on the loggia of St Mark’s on to carts to be transported to Paris. It has to be assumed that Napoleon himself insisted on their addition to the haul. He had already ordered any lions of Venice to be destroyed as symbols of the old regime, although the winged lion on the column in the Piazzetta was among those saved and taken to France. (It was re-erected on a fountain in front of the Hôpital des Invalides in Paris, having suffered the indignity of having its proudly outstretched tail cut off and replaced between its legs.) As for the horses, a surviving French print shows the massed French troops alongside the Piazza, with one horse already being drawn away as the last still dangles down from a rope over the portico. The watching crowd stands silent. Another, perhaps more accurate in that the horses are being hauled by soldiers towards the water rather than away from it as in the first, shows protesting Venetian citizens being roughly treated by the French troops. It seems to have been a richly remembered moment, and as late as 1839 a play called The Horses of the Carrousel: The Last Day of Venice was performed in Paris. Napoleon himself makes a guest appearance to the sound of the ‘Marseillaise’ and orders the horses off to ‘the Carrousel’, their new home in Paris.*
The horses are removed from St Mark’s on the orders of Napoleon in December 1797. Protesting Venetians are roughly dealt with by the French troops. (Charles Freeman)
The Venetians’ anger at the French was such that the arrival of their new overlords the Austrians – aristocratic, Catholic and ready to respect the Venetian heritage – in early 1798 was greeted with some relief. The great Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova wrote from his home village of Possagno on the mainland: ‘I do not have to strain my imagination to believe the joy of all the Venetian population and that of the Terra Firma at the arrival of the Austrian troops; peace, tranquillity, security are real benefits not to be compared with the fantasies of hotheads.’ Yet the horses were gone.
It was Canova who was eventually to secure their return.
14
‘TO THE CARROUSEL!’: THE HORSES TRIUMPH IN PARIS
AS WE HAVE SEEN, VENICE WAS FAR FROM THE ONLY CITY humiliated by Napoleon during his campaigns. By 1798 he had overrun most of Italy, setting up republics in the place of the pope, kings and grand dukes who had ruled the politically fragmented peninsula. His appropriation of the finest treasures of antiquity followed in the tradition initiated by the French revolutionary armies when they had conquered Belgium in 1794. These forces had used ‘the right of conquest’ to justify the seizing of whatever works of art came their way, but with the additional if specious claim that they had the right to free the defeated populations from the works of superstition and tyranny which filled churches and palaces. Among their plunder from Belgium was Rubens’ majestic Descent from the Cross, from Antwerp Cathedral, and a marble Madonna by Michelangelo from Bruges, probably the most important piece of sculpture in the country.
So when the pope, Pius VI, signed a truce with Napoleon in June 1796 after Napoleon had captured the papal city of Bologna, it was stipulated that he should surrender five hundred manuscripts and a hundred ‘pictures and busts’, the Brutuses among them. This was confirmed at the Treaty of Tolentino made with the pope in 1797. So far as the manuscripts were concerned Napoleon seems to have taken his cue from the ruthless republican Roman general Sulla, who after his sack of Athens in 86 BC had seized for Rome one of the finest libraries of the city, which included the works of Aristotle. Whatever the inspirations for the French commissioners in Rome and their masters, the city and its extraordinary collections, both public and private, were at their mercy and they showed few inhibitions in what they chose. It was now that they began assembling the finest ancient sculptures, including Winckelmann’s favourites, the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere, and bronzes from the Capitoline Museums such as the Spinario and the celebrated marble Capitoline Venus. The Dioscuri and the Marcus Aurelius would surely have been included too, had they not been impossibly heavy to transport. The Roman treasures were to be followed by others from major collections in Parma, Modena, Milan and Perugia. By 1799, when French control over Italy was even more extensive, Florence and Turin were also to be despoiled. (The Florentines did everything they could to avoid surrendering their masterpieces and it was not until August 1803 that Napoleon was able to view the Venus de’ Medici in Paris.)
Once the triumphal procession of July 1798 was over, the sculptures and paintings were taken on to be unpacked in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. The Louvre, originally a medieval fortress which had been converted into a Renaissance palace by Francis I, had been chosen by King Charles IX as his principal residence when he came of age in 1563. Charles’s formidable mother, Catherine de’ Medici, insisted on staying close to him and built her own palace, the Tuileries, on the site of a neighbouring tile factory (tuile = tile) so that she could be, in her own words, ‘invisible and present’ at the same time – he was, after all, still only thirteen. Later, at the end of the sixteenth century, King Henry IV constructed the Grande Galerie to connect the two palaces. By the eighteenth century, however, with the French kings having moved outside Paris to the Palace of Versailles, the whole complex was in a state of abandonment. There had been talk during the century of using the Louvre as a gallery for paintings, and the annual exhibition of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture was held there in the Salon Carré.* But it took the overthrow of the monarchy and the seizure of the royal art collections by the state for the plan to become a reality. The museum had been opened for the first time in 1793.
With the antiquities settled in Paris, Napoleon installed himself nearby in the Tuileries Palace and gradually consolidated his power. In November 1799 the scope of his political ambitions became clear when he overthrew the Directory. The influence of republican Rome remained strong enough for him to take the title of first consul (the consuls were the leading magistrates of republican Rome) in 1799, but in 1802 he transformed this into consul for life. Ironically this was an echo of the ‘dictator’ Julius Caesar’s decision, shortly before he was assassinated, to give himself a prolonged consulship, in his case for ten years. In a move worthy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the bust of Junius Brutus, hitherto a hero for the French as Caesar’s assassin, was taken from its pedestal before the Altar of the Fatherland and placed, almost anonymously it seems, among the other statues in the Louvre, which was renamed the Musée Napoléon. In 1804 Napoleon declared himself emperor of the French. The transformation from revolutionary to conservative ruler was complete. Jacques Louis David, whose most famous painting to date was that of the assassinated extremist Marat lying dead in his bath, completed a similar transition and re-emerged as the official painter of the new imperial regime.
So what happened to the Venetian horses? Their first home was on piers on the gateway to the Tuileries, but Napoleon wanted to use them more flamboyantly than this. He had already adopted many of the trappings of Roman imperialism, proclaiming himself in all but name the new Augustus, who had brought order to France without betraying its revolutionary ideals, just as the Emperor Augustus had claimed to have done in Rome in the first century BC. Whether he was creating a new system of laws (the Code Civil), designing a sewerage system for Paris or just decorating a palace, imperial Rome was now his model. He even discussed bringing Trajan’s Column, with its panorama of the military victory of the Emperor Trajan, to Paris; but fortunately it was too heavy to move, and Napoleon had to commission, in 1803, his own column of victories for the Place Vendôme.
Once arrived in Paris, the horses were first set up on the railings in front of the Tuileries Palace, which Napoleon had appropriated as the seat of imperial government. Two of them can be seen here on the far left and right of the railings. (Museo Correr, Venezia)
After his great victories over the Austrians at Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805, Napoleon had told his soldiers th
at they would ‘go home beneath triumphal arches’, and he now set in hand the construction of two in Paris. The first arch to be commissioned, in 1806, was that known today as the Arc de Triomphe, but this massive edifice was not completed until well after Napoleon’s fall and death (eventually only in 1836). Then, at eleven o’clock one night in February 1807, the emperor ordered his architect Fontaine to have five hundred labourers in place by the very next morning to begin preparing a site for a second arch which was to stand in the Place du Carrousel, an open space in front of the Tuileries, where the cavalry of Louis XIV had carried out its parades. It would serve as a grand entrance to the palace.
Plans were quickly drawn up. The immediate model was the arch of the emperor Constantine, which still stands by the Colosseum in Rome. Constantine’s arch had reliefs of his victories incorporated on the façades, and the Arc du Carrousel would be similarly adorned with Napoleon’s achievements. On Constantine’s arch there were eight free-standing figures of captives; on the Carrousel there would also be figures, but in this case they were to be of representatives of the Grande Armée. There was to be a further embellishment. Fontaine suggested that the ‘masterpiece of Greek sculpture, the horses, hitherto nomadic’, be placed on its summit. Behind them would be a chariot driven by Mars, the Roman god of war. When Fontaine was diverted to another imperial project it was the Director of Museums, Vivant Denon, who was put in charge of the design of the arch, and it was Denon who hatched the idea of placing a statue of the emperor himself in the chariot. The first stone was in place by 7 July, and on 1 January 1808 there is a report of Napoleon gazing at the arch, still in its scaffolding, from the windows of the Tuileries. He moaned that it was more of a lodge than a gateway, was too wide, that the marble columns (which were remnants taken from a seventeenth-century monument) were not as beautiful as those fronting the restored abbey of St Denis – but those around him could not help noticing his pride.
By August 1808 the summit was complete but still covered in canvas, and when Napoleon, in Paris for his birthday celebrations, asked what this was concealing, the governor of the Tuileries Palace, a rival of Denon, let slip that a statue of the emperor himself was being placed in the chariot. Napoleon insisted it be taken out – ‘It is not for me to make statues of myself’ – and ordered the chariot to be left empty. The statue was placed instead in the Orangerie of the Louvre. It is not clear why Napoleon was so coy about being represented in this context – given that less than two years before, in September 1806, he had shown no inhibitions about ordering a statue of himself, dressed as a Roman emperor with a globe surmounted by a personification of Victory in his hand, to be placed on top of the Vendôme column; and two years later, in 1809, when the Description d’Égypte, the great study of ancient Egypt commissioned after Napoleon’s conquest of the country, was published, he was shown in a quadriga on the frontispiece.
By the end of 1808 the arch was finished with the horses on its summit – but it was not universally admired. The most common criticisms were that the horses looked too small for the summit or that the statues personifying Victory who led them were too big. William Rootes, visiting Paris in 1814, after the first defeat of Napoleon by the allies opened the city again to English travellers, felt that much of their beauty was lost because of the height of the arch. Another English visitor, Henry Milton, was even harsher in his criticism.
The four bronze horses were placed on the summit and close to each other, harnessed to a triumphal car and led by two figures representing Victory and Peace. The horses are of natural size, these figures are colossal: and with a want of judgement and a depravity of taste, astonishing even in Paris, the car, the figures and all the other ridiculous appendages of the horses are sumptuously gilded … To build a puny arch of fine marble is no great offence, but to crowd together on its summit the matchless Venetian horses, to hide them from observation by disproportionate figures, a cumbrous car and gaudy discordant trappings is a transgression not easily to be pardoned.
The horses on the Arc du Carrousel, where many felt that they were eclipsed by the size of the arch. After their removal in 1815, a minor victory by France in Spain in the 1820s was used to justify the installation of replicas. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Milton’s thoughts reflect his English prejudices, but they also suggest that Napoleon’s ambition had resulted in a tasteless display of extravagance. Although the emperor liked to extol himself as a patron of the arts and sciences, there is no evidence that he had any aesthetic sense. We have a report that when his minister of the interior, Jean Antoine Chaptal, took him round the treasures of the Musée Napoléon, its main benefactor made virtually no comment except to ask occasionally for the name of an artist or sculptor, greeting the answer with apparent indifference. When he married, as his second wife, the Austrian princess Marie-Louise, he asked that Veronese’s Marriage at Cana (looted from Venice) be moved to the reception room. When Denon replied that it was too fragile to move, Napoleon retorted that, in that case, it might as well be burned. In his palaces and the homes of his newly created aristocracy heavy, ornate and opulent objets d’art came to predominate, and the lightness of tone so typical of much French art of the eighteenth century was lost. The artistic bankruptcy of the regime was epitomized by a factory owned by Napoleon’s sister Elisa which churned out five hundred busts of him a year, using a new pointing system and an organized production line. In fact, she initiated the mass production of small copies of sculptures which overwhelm visitors to the tourist areas of Italy today.
Nevertheless the collecting continued, with more masterpieces from Germany, Spain and Italy (after the French administration closed down all monasteries there) being added to the Musée Napoléon. In 1809 Prince Borghese, owner of one of the great Roman collections, was forced to sell it to Napoleon for eight million francs, not all of which ever reached him. (The fact that the prince was married to Napoleon’s favourite sister Pauline meant nothing.) Vivant Denon, who had come to Napoleon’s notice when he accompanied the emperor on his famous expedition to Egypt, proved an extraordinarily energetic curator. He was now in his sixties, having begun his career in the court of King Louis XV, but he hurried off to each country as it was conquered to see what he could sequester or buy, and acted as a propagandist for what was by 1810 by far the most impressive museum in the world. Always the consummate courtier, he reported to a colleague that in his desire to serve Napoleon’s first wife, the Empress Josephine, ‘I always took, in addition to the paintings I was ordered to seize, a number of pretty little things which the Emperor would be delighted to give her.’
He was to enjoy only four more years of glory. By 1811 the British were wearing down Napoleon’s armies in Spain. In 1812 came the disastrous winter campaign in Russia. In 1814 Napoleon’s overblown and overextended empire finally collapsed at the hands of a coalition of powers, Austria, Prussia, Russia and Great Britain. Napoleon abdicated on 6 April and by May the allies had restored the royal family, in the person of Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI. In none of the peace treaties, however, was any mention made of the looted antiquities. There were good reasons for this. The concern of the great powers was to settle the French down under a restored royal family, and it was hoped that Louis would negotiate himself with those who wished for the return of their treasures; the allies did not want to weaken the settlement by insisting on such restitution themselves. They accepted, too, that many of the works had been acquired through treaties, notably that made at Tolentino with the pope, and there was a reluctance to break diplomatic convention by declaring these agreements invalid. As Pius VII had no soldiers and only one of the allied powers, Austria, was Catholic, he had little negotiating power. Hopes were raised in May when Louis announced that he would be prepared to return any works of art not already displayed in the Louvre or the Tuileries, but by June his position had shifted and he talked vaguely of ‘masterpieces of the arts which belong to us from now on by stronger rights than those of victo
ry’. The Musée Napoléon was renamed the Musée Royal as if everything had simply passed from the deposed emperor to the returning monarch.
This relaxed attitude to Napoleon’s plunder on the part of the allies changed when in March 1815 Napoleon escaped from his first place of exile, Elba, landed in France to widespread acclamation, reformed the Grande Armée and came close to defeating the allied troops at Waterloo in June. With his second capitulation in 1815, many of the inhibitions of 1814 were swept away and there was now talk of punishing France. When the French tried to insert a clause in the peace treaty of 3 July guaranteeing ‘the integrity of museums and libraries’, it was struck out. By 10 July Prussian soldiers had arrived at the Louvre to take Prussia’s treasures back. The British prime minister, Lord Liverpool, supported the return: ‘It is most desirable’, he announced on 15 July, ‘in point of policy to remove them if possible from France, as whilst in that country they must necessarily have the effect of keeping up the remembrance of their former conquests and of cherishing the military spirit and vanity of the nation.’ The British – notably the Prince Regent – who had themselves had designs on some of the antiquities, particularly the Apollo Belvedere, realized that this would be a humiliation too far for France, and shifted to support the restoration of art works to their original owners. On 5 August the Austrians put in a formal request to the French government for their losses. The pope sent his envoy in the shape of Antonio Canova, who arrived in Paris on 28 August. (His mission is dealt with in the next chapter.)
On 20 September the allies concluded a formal agreement stipulating that all art objects be returned to their original homes. Only the Russians did not sign, it is said because Tsar Alexander had bought the finest paintings in the collection of Josephine Bonaparte, who had been divorced by Napoleon in 1809, from her family when she died in 1814 and, if he acquiesced in the agreement, they would be among those which would have to be returned. The duke of Wellington, buoyed with immense prestige as victor of Waterloo, and commander in chief of the allied forces in France, weighed in in support of the agreement. No one, he argued in a letter to the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, is taken in by the argument that the art is better off in France than it would be in its original homes. It is only the national vanity of the French which keeps it in Paris. If they had seized the ‘pictures and statues of other nations’ solely through force of arms, they could hardly complain that these were returned, and indeed it would serve as ‘a moral lesson’ to the French if they were. The London Courier made the point that if the allies behaved as the French had done they would have stripped France of the art it had accumulated before the reign of Napoleon. Wellington was prepared to condone the use of troops to ensure the dismantlement of the museum and, in the face of rising anger among the Parisians, he ordered a formal parade of all his forces to stress his point.
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