C’est le grec qu’il faudrait apprendre.
When Napoleon, only twenty-seven, assumed command of the French army in Italy in 1796, he knew that removing art from any lands he conquered was simply part of his mission, a part he zealously discharged. He sent the works back in large convoys whose arrival in Paris was celebrated with a holiday of parades and celebrations. The first such shipment, which was welcomed to Paris by a huge procession around the Champs de Mars, included the famous four horses of Venice (which Napoleon later installed atop the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel); paintings by Raphael, Titian, and Veronese; and ancient statues including the Capitoline Venus and the Apollo Belvedere. The latter, which Winckelmann had described so passionately, was considered the single greatest work of art to have survived from the antique world.
While Napoleon was in power, he continued this wholesale pillage. But he did not depend on groups of “educated citizens” to find the masterpieces. Instead he appointed an official connoisseur, Dominique-Vivant Denon, who not only directed the Louvre and other state museums but also rushed into each newly conquered territory, sometimes while the battle was still in the balance, in order to choose which of the available masterpieces to send back to Paris.
Today the Louvre is divided into three wings, one of which is named after Denon. Born Dominique-Vivant de Non, he changed his name during the Revolution to disguise his noble lineage. He was a sensualist, known for his taste for actresses, who really did participate in the sort of group debauches in remote country châteaux that have become a cliché of pornography. He was a dilettante who painted prolifically if forgettably; staged a moderately successful comic play; wrote a sexy little novel, set in a remote château, titled Point de Lendemain (No Tomorrow), which most recently resurfaced as a motif in Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness and has a cult following in France; and published engaging memoirs and travelogues. But most of all he was a connoisseur both of art and of people.
With people his connoisseurship took the form of a charming sycophancy. Denon managed the seemingly impossible by ingratiating himself with—in succession—Louis XV, Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Napoleon. He knew Voltaire, Frederick II, Catherine the Great, Danton, and Talleyrand, the wily diplomat who was brilliant and slippery enough to become minister of foreign affairs for Napoleon and then for Louis XVIII. And he was an intimate friend of Josephine’s long before she married Napoleon.
He first encountered Napoleon at a reception given by Talleyrand. Denon was used to such occasions and quite at ease; Napoleon was still a young officer, gauche and rather timid. Denon kindly offered him a glass of lemonade. They fell into conversation about Italy and the Mediterranean, which Denon knew well, and about Corsica, Napoleon’s birthplace, about which Denon knew nothing, although he knew how to talk as if he did. Napoleon never forgot the agreeable impression Denon made on him.
Under the empire Denon’s official title was general director of museums. In that role he commissioned paintings of the emperor and his victories from leading artists such as Jacques-Louis David. He also mounted regular exhibits that were generally successful. Primarily, however, he accompanied Napoleon on his campaigns and remained behind after the fighting to select artworks and arrange for them to be carefully packed and sent to Paris. He did not loot indiscriminately. Instead he took only the best and left behind the merely good, often agonizing over the distinction.
The Musée Napoléon, as the Louvre was called during the Empire, became Denon’s masterpiece. Visitors could not believe what they saw. One recalled that the artworks “are displayed in such profusion that in the midst of so much beauty the eye no longer knows where to rest.” Another kept remarking, “Is this really real?” And everywhere in the crowds were invalids, soldiers in tattered uniforms, and ordinary workers, all with skin weathered by the sun. They mutely pondered this profusion of beauty, none of which had ever before been available for people like them to see.
The masterpieces reclaimed
NAPOLEON himself had no interest in art. His taste was neither good nor bad but nonexistent. He thought that art was simply an imitation of nature and that there was no merit in mere imitation of any kind. His motivation in removing art to France seems to have been simply that he wanted to take the best from any country he dominated. That to him was what a conqueror did. Whenever Napoleon was shown around the Louvre, even during the glorious heights of the Musée Napoléon, he tried to proceed from room to room without stopping at all. If a work was specifically drawn to his attention, he might ask the name of the artist, after which he would stare straight ahead at the piece without expression.
There was one exception. Napoleon was proud of the Apollo Belvedere. It was by far the single greatest possession of the Musée Napoléon. The emperor himself occasionally conducted dignitaries in private to gaze upon the statue and, in turn, upon the emperor illuminated by its radiant glory.
After Winckelmann published his ecstatic description in his History of Ancient Art, and before the arrival of the Venus de Milo in Paris, it is impossible to overestimate the grip the Apollo Belvedere had on the European imagination. It was almost as if the French had inaugurated the policy of looting with it in mind. Even before Napoleon’s Italian campaign, while the revolutionary armies were still busy subjugating Belgium, an influential delegate in the government announced, “Certainly, if our victorious armies penetrate into Italy, the removal of the Apollo Belvedere … would be the most brilliant conquest.” The German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, perhaps forgetting for the moment his revered Winckelmann, said that no mere mortal could describe “this celestial mixture of accessibility and severity, benevolence and gravity, majesty and mildness.” Veneration for the Apollo Belvedere was a sign of sophistication and educated taste. Copies were everywhere—in royal courts, in museums, and on rich estates. In 1819 the French writer Stendhal made a single remark in dismissing the United States as a cultural desert: “Can one find anywhere in that so prosperous and rich America a single copy, in marble, of the Apollo Belvedere?” The plaque on the statue in the Musée Napoléon, which the emperor himself had attached to the base, described it as “the most sublime statue that time has preserved for us.” For three centuries it had been the pride of the Vatican until “heroes, guided by Victory, came to take it away and set it forever by the banks of the Seine.”
This gloating boast almost proved accurate, since Denon’s Musée Napoléon very nearly survived the emperor’s fall. After Napoleon’s first abdication, in 1814, the treaty that placed Louis XVIII on the throne specifically ceded ownership of all stolen art in the museum to France. The European powers against Napoleon thought Louis was so weak that his hold on the throne was tentative at best. Leaving the artworks in France was a simple, if expensive, way to avoid creating resentment in France against the new regime.
But after Napoleon escaped from Elba, returned for the Hundred Days, and was defeated at Waterloo, the allies were not in such an accommodating mood. Now they wanted their artworks back. As English, German, and Austrian troops occupied Paris, some of them were detailed to the Louvre to remove paintings and statues. Denon was distraught. He did what he could to fight the confiscations, but in the end he was powerless. Paintings by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Caravaggio, and many other masters were all carted away. An armed squadron seized the Apollo Belvedere and returned it to the Vatican. Today it stands in the Octagonal Court of the Pio-Clementine Museum in the Vatican. The Laocoön is nearby.
In all, the allies reclaimed more than five thousand works, including 2,065 paintings, 130 statues in stone, 150 bas-reliefs, 289 bronzes, and many vases, drawings, miniatures, enamels, wooden sculptures, and other diverse objets d’art. Afterward, as Louis XVIII toured the Louvre to observe what remained, he remarked calmly, “We are still rich.” But that was not the general view. A popular woodcut from the time shows a French artist crying into his handkerchief in front of the Louvre as a troop of soldiers with muskets wheel th
e Apollo Belvedere away.
Artist, lover
UPON TAKING the throne, Louis XVIII left Denon in his post for the moment, but he installed the comte de Forbin immediately below him in the administration of the museum. As the king was beginning his tour of the Louvre, he said, “Monsieur Denon and you, Monsieur de Forbin, who know this temple, show me and explain to me these marvels.” Denon understood as well as anyone the subtleties in the apparently casual comments of a king. That Louis would address him and Forbin as equals meant that Denon’s days as director of the museum were numbered. He resigned and devoted the remaining years of his life to writing a history of art. In 1816 Louis XVIII elevated Louis-Nicolas-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Forbin, to the office of director.
We have encountered Forbin before, dining with Vice-consul Brest at his home on Melos in 1817. Now, as head of the Louvre, he would be the one to receive the Venus de Milo at the museum, oversee any restoration, and direct its placement and display. Forbin had a reputation as a playboy and a dilettante, but he turned out to be an effective executive. He inherited the Louvre at a critical moment, when its newly acquired collections had been stripped and its finances were limited, its future direction unclear. By the time he began to retire from his duties—in 1828, after the first in a long, painful series of strokes—he had so revived the Louvre that it was once again the leading museum in the Western world.
Forbin became director when he was thirty-nine years old. Tall, perhaps ever so slightly too thin, he was still young and robust enough to maintain his reputation as the handsomest man in France. He had an oval face, a high forehead, and a great mass of curly black hair. He dressed elegantly, almost to the point of dandyism, and his spectacular appearance was set off by his pleasant manners. He appeared easy, natural, at home with himself. His conversation sparkled. He could improvise comic verses effortlessly. His voice was musical, softened by a lilting, southern accent that came from his childhood in Provence.
His famous looks went hand in hand with his reputation as a lover. Napoleon’s beautiful but completely daffy sister, Princess Pauline Borghese, was one of Forbin’s mistresses. Her exquisite form is still on display in the Villa Borghese in Rome, where Canova sculpted her as Venus reclining nude upon a couch.
Louis-Nicolas-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Forbin, by Ingres (illustration credit 3.1)
Forbin had a succession of other mistresses and was a prized, highly visible guest in the best salons of Restoration Paris. He had a long flirtation with Madame Récamier, the greatest beauty of the era, whose portrait by David hangs in the Louvre. Purportedly a virgin—at any rate, her marriage to a much older banker, who may have been her own father, was never consummated—she used Forbin’s infatuation to tantalize another of her admirers, the writer Benjamin Constant. Madame Récamier goaded Constant so effectively that he challenged Forbin to a duel during which, after some tempestuous posturing, neither man was hurt.
Forbin had had an obsession with painting since he was just a boy. He was born in 1777 in a château on the banks of the Durance to one of the oldest aristocratic families in the south of France. After his family moved to Aix-en-Provence, they enrolled him in an art school. There he met François-Marius Granet, the son of a bricklayer, who became his closest friend and the most important and enduring emotional attachment of his life. (Today there is a museum devoted to Granet’s work in Aix.)
During the Revolution, Forbin’s family lost their property. At sixteen he witnessed the executions of both his father and his uncle on the guillotine. For the rest of his life Forbin suffered from bouts of brooding loneliness. Although he had a brother, sisters, many cousins, and eventually a wife and two daughters of his own, he was reserved and unemotional about family ties. He was unable to trust them or let them sustain him. “I am a little surprised by the silence of your sisters,” he once wrote to Granet, “but I know from experience what family relations are.”
In 1798, after some time spent dodging revolutionary armies in the south, Forbin was living in Paris, where he studied at the school of David, then the leading artist in France. Forbin persuaded David to admit Granet and even paid his tuition of twelve francs a month. Forbin wrote several years later that this time together “cemented the affection between the two sons of Provence and came to unite them more forcefully each day.”
At David’s school some sixty students and their easels were crowded into one room at the Louvre. The only light came from long, narrow windows high in the walls. The more advanced students surrounded a live model—always nude and always male—on a platform. The other students worked from plaster casts or, if they were new to the school, copied engravings. Every day or so, usually around noon, David would arrive, immaculately dressed, and stride magisterially from student to student, commenting on their work and intoning about art. He was then working on his great masterpiece The Rape of the Sabine Women, now in the Louvre. “I want to return art to the principles that Greek artists followed,” he lectured to his students one day. “I want to create pure Greek. I nourish my eyes with antique statues and I intend even to imitate some of them. The Greeks didn’t have any scruples about reproducing a composition, a movement, a style that already existed. They put all their care, all their art toward perfecting an idea that they already had before them.” He said that all art since Phidias was mannered, false, theatrical, ugly, ignoble. He told his students that they should not look at any of the paintings in the long galleries of the Louvre. They should let their eyes fall only on antique Greek statues. They should ignore all statues, whether Greek or Roman, created since Alexander the Great. All of this was, of course, pure Winckelmann.
Forbin was twenty when he heard these declamations by David. They would not determine his taste forever, and David himself deviated from them often enough. But the lessons, as well as Forbin’s loyalty to his imperious and blustering teacher, would influence his reaction to the statue found on Melos twenty years later.
According to a fellow student, Forbin was the “soul” of the school: “Forbin carried, under his extremely simple clothes, all the ease and the slightly mocking familiarity of a gentleman in the midst of young people with whom he had nothing in common except their age.” In this time of revolutionary fervor he did not use either his title or the aristocratic “de” before his name. Instead he won the students over with his elegance, his wit, and even his extraordinary height and bearing. He could speak fluent Italian. In French his pleasant Provençal patois gave a wry nuance to his jokes and puns. Sometimes he would grab whatever came to hand, a cane or a broken leg from an easel, and go dancing around the room singing comic verses he improvised and beating time with the stick in his hand like the leading man in a musical farce. In fact, during those years he wrote a successful comic play called Sterne à Paris.
In June 1799 he married a woman he later glumly described as the only daughter of a rich man of Burgundy. Their first child, a daughter named Lydia, was born eleven months later. Shortly after that Forbin left to live and travel in Italy with Granet. Forbin returned to France long enough to have a second daughter, Valentine, who was born in December 1804. But only a few months later, back in Italy, Forbin met Pauline, Napoleon’s sister. They lived together openly for two years, a situation that produced no end of jealousies and intrigues. Pauline finally tired of him in 1807. To get rid of him before he could cause more trouble, Napoleon sent him to the army in Portugal, where Forbin, confounding the assumptions about him, fought so bravely that he was awarded the Legion of Honor.
He continued to paint and exhibited successfully in several salons. He published Charles Barimore, a steamy novel that became a sensation among titled women of the Empire. His liaison with Pauline had helped make his painting fashionable, although when he encountered her again by chance in 1812, she pretended to have forgotten him entirely.
The greatest frustration of his life was that Granet preferred to live in Italy rather than Paris. Forbin wrote Granet pleading letters and hurt, accusing love
poems. But Granet had established a household in Rome with the wife of an Italian gentleman, a woman Granet called Nena, whom he adored. In time they both became great favorites of Forbin’s younger daughter, Valentine. Granet returned to Paris only when Forbin secured a position and a good salary for him at the Louvre in 1827. Finally, in 1831, Granet moved in with Forbin, who had become increasingly feeble after continued strokes. Granet took care of him until Forbin’s death in 1841. By then Nena’s husband had died, and at last Granet was able to marry her. He was sixty-eight, and she was seventy-six. They had been lovers since their youth.
The unhappy husband
BY CONTRAST with the Musée Napoléon, it was a bare and forlorn Louvre that Forbin inherited from Denon in 1816. In particular, it was empty of impressive antiquities. The Apollo Belvedere was back in the Vatican. Worse, that very year, the British parliament voted to purchase from Lord Elgin the marble reliefs he had ripped from the pediments of the Parthenon and transported to London. Now called the Elgin marbles, they were undeniably from the age of classical Greece. Their provenance and their beauty provoked spasms of jealousy in German and French connoisseurs. The Elgin marbles were placed in the British Museum, which in a single stroke became the leading institution in Europe.
Forbin didn’t waste time moping. He immediately set out on a voyage to the Aegean and to Egypt in search of antiquities to buy for the Louvre. It was during this trip that he dined with Brest. While on Melos, he sketched the ruins of the Roman theater. As he worked, he stood not too far from the place where the Venus de Milo would be discovered three years later. In Cairo he disguised himself as an Arab and silently explored the mosques and other mysterious corners of the Arab quarter. He even visited the slave market, where he bid unsuccessfully on a young Circassian girl. Along the way, he did buy some antiquities for the museum, but nothing that would seize the imagination of Europe.
Gregory Curtis Page 7