Napoleon, David
Napoleon, David portrays the Emperor as a consummate propagandist who understood the primacy of image in sustaining power. In the 1799 Syrian campaign, Napoleon deserted the sick and wounded and ultimately lost half his army. To squelch rumors, Josephine commissioned Antoine-Jean Gros to reframe history. Thus, in Napoleon at the Penthouse at Jaffa (1804), impervious to infection, like some god, the benevolent leader comforts bubonic plague victims.
In David, Napoleon found the perfect image maker, a republican whose allegorical paintings--such as The Oath of the Horatii (1784), commissioned by Louis XVI--inculcated Roman virtue. In Napoleon, David found the ideal subject, a conqueror with the perfect visage and an imperious flair for grandiosity. “What a fine face he has,” David said during a sitting in 1798. “It is pure. It is grand. Like antiquity.”
Napoleon sought to dissemble naked power in reverence for the past. Thus, his Coronation featured a pastiche of ritual objects and costumes, some invented--such as the ersatz crown of Charlemagne. Napoleon’s white silk tunic, embroidered with bees, a symbol of empire, a hive with one leader, was genuinely emblematic of Charlemagne. The red velvet robes, the yards and yards of ermine and gold trim, recalled the Bourbon dynasty. In scrutinizing the dominant ritual symbols in isolation--Charlemagne’s scepter, the sword of Louis XVI--the camera seems to invoke their totemic power.
Jean is at his best during such moments, when he subjects artifacts to a detailed appreciation of their craftsmanship and ritual significance. The exposition of content finds its ideal medium when the camera extends acuity and understanding, as when a gray, skeletal Josephine in David’s sketch book dissolves and blooms into red and gold, a finished figure on the grand tableau. When the narrator terms most of the faces in Napoleon’s Coronation “expressionless,” a slow, halting pan renders the assertion myopic.
Jean’s least compelling footage is a clumsy bit of agit-prop staged in the Louvre. To illustrate Napoleon’s reinstitution of slavery, the camera frames a period drawing of manacled blacks in the tropics. Cut to Cour Marly, an expansive sculpture gallery where a black janitor is cleaning a marble staircase. The camera recedes to show an actor dressed as Napoleon crossing the chamber, the crisp echo of heel on stone. The juxtaposition of oppressor and oppressed?
But this is a small transgression, easily forgiven. For Napoleon, David is even-handed in its reminder that spectacle diverts the eye from oppression. The Louvre also houses the Code of Hammurabi, a conical, black basalt stele, seven feet in height. Above the compendium of rules, a ritual scene legitimates Hammurabi’s authority as law giver, as ruler. Before the sun god Shamash, stands a reverent Hammurabi, his arms folded in prayer, as Shamash invests him with the symbols of royal authority, a scepter and ring. Napoleon, David reveals that underneath all the pomp and finery lies a ruse as old as Babylon.
Tony Osborne Gonzaga University Osborne@gonzaga.edu
