Napoleon on His Imperial Throne by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1806) The Musee de l’Armee, Paris.
To mark the bicentennary of Napoleon’s coronation as French Emperor – which took place in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris on 2 December 1804 – this week’s picture is Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ portrait of Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne. Painted for the Paris Salon of 1806, this large and unforgettably bizarre picture marked Ingres’ public debut. It can be seen, these days, in the Musee de l’Armee in Paris.
Despite its scale and evident ambition, the painting was not a public commission, but Ingres’ own invention, and a testament to his youthful self-confidence. He was not important enough to have been invited to the coronation ceremony itself (an event depicted by his teacher and master, Jacques-Louis David, in an even vaster canvas now in the Louvre) and he had never even met Napoleon. So instead of producing anything remotely resembling a painting of record, he set out to weave France’s new emperor into his own unsettling fantasy of immutable, imperturbable power and authority. He created an image of such utter stasis, such magnificently frozen omnipotence, that it must have struck his more irreverent contemporaries as almost comically at odds with the actual pace of historical change, the almost bewildering succession of events, that had seen Napoleon sweep to power in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
Drawing on an eclectic variety of sources, Ingres has contrived to make one of the world’s great political opportunists look as if divinely foreordained to rule all of France, for all time. Elevated above the world of mere mortals, he is seated on a gleaming gilt throne, set on a carpeted dais decorated with images of the zodiac and the imperial Carolingian eagle. His robe is decorated with bees, a Frankish emblem revived by Napoleon to symbolise the industry and diligence of France under his reign. He rests a sumptuously beslippered foot on a cushion of imperial purple velvet worked, in gold thread, with images of stylised thunderbolts, proclaiming his Jove-like might.
As if to suggest not only his historical legitimacy but his miraculous incorporation of the powers of all the powerful rulers of the past, Ingres has almost smothered Napoleon with symbols. He is crowned with laurel, like a Roman emperor, and holds aloft with his right hand the sceptre of Charles V. Nestling in the crook of his left elbow is the hand of justice of Charlemagne (he also wears Charlemagne’s sword, in a jewel-encrusted sheath). The picture aggrandises Napoleon but also, paradoxically, diminishes him, truncates him to a porcelain-like doll’s face, lost in ermine and velvet, overwhelmed by the accoutrements of Ingres’ fantasy. The painter Francois Gerard, whose studio neighboured that of Ingres, reportedly compared the portrait to the jewel-encrusted cult statue of Our Lady of Loreto, which was at the time on display in the Cabinet des Medailles in Paris, part of Napoleon’s extensive war booty. It was an apt if double-edged compliment, which perfectly captures the extreme, cultish eccentricity of Ingres’ painting.
In fact, Ingres was directly influenced by another famous trophy brought to France by Napoleon, namely Hubert and Jan Van Eyck’s great Ghent Altarpiece, which was exhibited at the Louvre from 1799 to 1816. Napoleon’s hieratic frontal pose is directly adapted from the figure of God the Father in the Ghent altarpiece, although it owes a debt, too, to antique images recording the Greek sculptor Phidias’s famous lost Olympian Jupiter. The style of the painting, with its hard, cold light, which was likened by one critic to moonbeams, was Ingres’ conscious attempt to revive the minute surface realism of early Flemish Renaissance art. The subtly curved reflection of a window, in one of the two ivory globes decorating Napoleon’s throne, is a distinctively Van Eyckian detail.
The portrait, while extremely original and utterly different from other contemporary portraits of Napoleon, most of which were carried out in a rather tired version of the Baroque style, turned out to represent a serious miscalculation on Ingres’ part. In August, just before the September opening of the Salon, an inspector working for Vivant Denon, principal advisor to the imperial court, paid a visit to Ingres’ studio. While intrigued by the work of the young painter “in the student class”, he was also clearly disconcerted by the strangely inflamed archaism of the symbol-surfeited picture that he had produced. “I do not think that this picture can have any success with the court,” he concluded. “In adopting the type of Images of Charlemagne, the author has chosen to imitate even the style of this period of art. Some artists who admire the grand and simple style of our early painters will praise him for having dared to make a fourteenth-century picture. Society will find it Gothic and barbarous.”
The critics reviewing the Salon of 1806 proved him right. The painting met with a chorus of disapproval, epitomised by the remarks that appeared in a review published in the Mercure de France: “Had Ingres attempted to paint Dagobert or another king of the earliest dynasty, he could not have chosen more Gothic ornaments or given the figure a more coldly symmetrical pose.” Ingres was bitterly disappointed by the reception given to the painting and seems to have regarded it as an embarrassment. He never requested its inclusion in any of the exhibitions of his work organised during his own lifetime and did his best, it seems, to forget that he had ever painted it. Despite its manifest weirdness, I wonder if its real sin lay in its honesty. It is a bizarre fantasy but one that perfectly reflects that illusion of inviolability and infallibility, tinged with dangerous megalomania, that was eventually to be Napoleon’s downfall.
Andrew Graham Dixon
05/12/2004
