Staging Empire
Napoleon, Ingres, and David
272 pages | 48 color/82 b&w illustrations | 7 x 10 | 2006
ISBN 978-0-271-02858-3 | cloth: $55.00 sh
Paperback edition is not available
Napoleon Bonaparte conquered France and Europe in thename of liberté, égalité, et fraternité,but he suppressedfreedom to achieve his aims. This was the birth of modernempire, and France’s greatest artists were enlisted for thecause. Staging Empire focuses on two landmark paintingsthat celebrated Napoleon’s coronation: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806) and Jacques-Louis David’s Le Sacre (1805–07).In an unprecedented collaboration, two scholars investigatethese masterpieces in their broad cultural context. Thisbook is a sumptuously illustrated, extensively documented,analytical tour de force. Coronation pictures may seem tobe all about the past, but they were produced to guaranteea future of empire whose military, media, and geopoliticalpractices are still with us today.
Staging Empire surveys the period’s essential problem ofrepresenting authority in the aftermath of the FrenchRevolution. Ingres’s portrait of the new emperor is steepedin archaic symbolism, bolstered by the cult of recentlyminted relics. The picture’s strangeness, the press’switheringcritiques, and the government’s anxious sponsorshipare explored. The discussion lays bare the precariousnessof modern art and politics and the dangers of culturalindependence in the public sphere.
Traditionally accepted as a document of the coronation ofNapoleon and Josephine, Le Sacre is instead shown to bethe most important barometer of the Empire’s propagandisticstrategies. The authors present it in light of Josephine’scentral role and of its critical reception in newspapers andthe hitherto untapped archives of Napoleon’s secret police.Le Sacre heralded an age of phony governmental transparency.Modern cultural practices, including consumerism,repressive theories of race and gender, and art history itself,were marshalled by the emperor’s official painter.
ToddPorterfield is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Art History at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism (1998).
Susan L. Siegfried is Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Her publications include Fingering Ingres (2001), with Adrian Rifkin; The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly (1995); and, with Marjorie Cohn, Works by J. A. D. Ingres in the Collection of the Fogg Art Museum (1980).
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Part I: Introduction
Prologue: A King Listens
Italo Calvino
1 Staging an Empire
Susan L. Siegfried
Part II: Ingres’s Portrait of Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne
Susan L. Siegfried
2 The Painting
3 Patronage
4 The Critics
Part III: David’s Sacre
Todd Porterfield
5 Patterns of Reception
6 Fabulous Retroactivity
7 Makeup and Shopping
Part IV: Epilogue
Todd Porterfield
8 Epilogue
Appendixes
A. “Interior. Paris, 11 frimaire,” Gazette nationale ou Le Moniteur universel, No. 72, Monday, 12 frimaire an 13 de la République [December 3, 1804]
B. “Variety,” Gazette nationale ou Le Moniteur universel, No. 76, Friday, 16 frimaire an 13 de la République [December 7, 1804]
C. “Interior. Paris, January 15,” Gazette nationale ou Le Moniteur universel, No. 16, Saturday, January 16, 1808
D. Arlequin at the Museum, or a vaudeville critique of the paintings exhibited at the Salon. Twelfth year, no. 2 (Paris: Brasseur aîné, 1808): 3–8.
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Photograph Credits