Staging Empire

Napoleon, Ingres, and David

Todd Porterfield, Susan Siegfried (Autoren)

Buch | Hardcover

272 Seiten

2007
Pennsylvania State University Press (Verlag)
978-0-271-02858-3 (ISBN)

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Focuses on two landmark paintings that celebrated Napoleon Bonaparte's coronation: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' "Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne" (1806) and Jacques-Louis David's "Le Sacre" (1805-07). This book surveys the period's essential problem of representing authority in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Napoleon Bonaparte conquered France and Europe in the name of liberté, égalité, et fraternité, but he suppressed freedom to achieve his aims. This was the birth of modern empire, and France’s greatest artists were enlisted for the cause. Staging Empire focuses on two landmark paintings that celebrated Napoleon’s coronation: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806) and Jacques-Louis David’s Le Sacre (1805–7). In an unprecedented collaboration, two scholars investigate these masterpieces in their broad cultural context. This book is a sumptuously illustrated, extensively documented, analytical tour de force. Coronation pictures may seem to be all about the past, but they were produced to guarantee a future of empire whose military, media, and geopolitical practices are still with us today.

Staging Empire surveys the period’s essential problem of representing authority in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Ingres’s portrait of the new emperor is steeped in archaic symbolism, bolstered by the cult of recently minted relics. The picture’s strangeness, the press’s withering critiques, and the government’s anxious sponsorship are explored. The discussion lays bare the precariousness of modern art and politics and the dangers of cultural independence in the public sphere.

Traditionally accepted as a document of the coronation of Napoleon and Josephine, Le Sacre is instead shown to be the most important barometer of the Empire’s propagandistic strategies. The authors present it in light of Josephine’s central role and of its critical reception in newspapers and the 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 marshaled by the emperor’s official painter.

Todd Porterfield 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

Zusatzinfo	48 Halftones, color; 82 Halftones, black and white
Verlagsort	Pennsylvania
Sprache	englisch
Maße	178 x 254 mm
Gewicht	1107 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	0-271-02858-0 / 0271028580
ISBN-13	978-0-271-02858-3 / 9780271028583
Zustand	Neuware