Plunder by Cynthia Saltzman

Author:Cynthia Saltzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

16

“The transparency of air … place[s] Gros beside Tintoretto and Paul Veronese”

The life of Napoleon is the event of the century for all the arts.

—Eugène Delacroix

If The Wedding Feast at Cana refused to conform to the rules of French academic taste, hanging prominently in the Louvre, it could hardly be ignored. The Venetian canvas was in its way a subversive presence, to be seen and studied by its most important audience—the artists of France. “Artists come running! Here are your masters!” cried the banner on the carts that had paraded the Italian plunder across Paris. Indeed, even those artists who had condemned the French art seizures in Italy did not stay away now that these paintings and sculptures were on display at the Louvre. To French painters, the Veronese threw down the gauntlet—in its scale and magnificence. Its scale was the scale that Napoleon was now demanding as he commissioned pictures to commemorate his battles and create a visual history of his reign.

However, for artists who aspired to greatness, such painting commissions were no longer straightforward. One of the most difficult commissions Napoleon offered, in 1803, was to Antoine-Jean Gros. Napoleon has “given me a subject to treat,” Gros wrote to the artist Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. “He had enjoyed describing it to me himself.” The subject was to be a moment of heroism in the Egyptian campaign—a visit Bonaparte made on March 21, 1799, to a hospital set up in an Armenian monastery in Jaffa to minister to French soldiers stricken by the bubonic plague. He had stopped at Jaffa on his way north to take on Ottoman forces in Syria.

Napoleon had much riding on Gros’s painting, hoping the artist would create an image to recast the problematic facts of France’s 1801 defeat by the British in Egypt but also to combat reports in the British press of Napoleon’s brutality not only toward the enemy but also toward some of his own troops.

The political landscape was shifting. After only a year, the peace negotiated at Amiens had collapsed. On May 18, 1803, Great Britain had declared war on France. Already, British travelers had begun to evacuate Paris. “Flight was the order of the day,” wrote Bertie Greatheed, a British playwright. “And the most judicious prepared immediately for their departure.”

The approach of war had emboldened Bonaparte to expand his power. So too had threats against his life. His minister of police, Joseph Fouché, had foiled a royalist plot, financed by the British and led by Georges Cadoudal, whose treason was punished by execution. To further warn his enemies, on March 15, 1804, Bonaparte ordered French soldiers to cross the border into Baden and arrest Louis de Bourbon Condé, the Duc d’Enghien. Although he knew the duke to be innocent of plotting his execution, Bonaparte still had him brought to the Château de Vincennes, on the eastern edge of Paris, and tried before a military commission, which found him guilty and had him shot. Enghien’s murder enraged the monarchs of Europe, further fueling their distrust of Napoleon.

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