The Caesar of Paris Read online

  Three years earlier, on October 5, 1795, the Corsican-born officer made headlines by quashing a major royalist insurrection in Paris. The following year, he was given command of the dejected army of Italy. That spring, as a newlywed, Napoleon led his troops across the Alps into Piedmont and Lombardy, stunning Europe with a series of victories over Austria. “On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi, and let the world know that after all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor,” Stendhal famously wrote.33

  As Napoleon’s army marched across northern and central Italy, its young general added clauses to peace treaties demanding precise quantities and often specific works of art. With his organized plunder, Napoleon institutionalized a policy begun by the Directory. After occupying Belgium in 1794, the Directory packed off seven convoys of painting and sculptures. Among the treasures were Peter Paul Rubens’s The Descent from the Cross and Erection of the Cross (from Antwerp Cathedral), the crucifixion scene Le Coup de Lance, a sculpture of the Madonna of Bruges by Michelangelo, and the central panels of Jan van Eyck’s altarpiece from Ghent’s St. Bavo Cathedral, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

  Weeks after pilfering the famous fifteenth century altarpiece, librarian Antoine Alexandre Barbier addressed the National Convention: “Too long have these masterpieces been sullied by the gaze of serfs. . . . These immortal works are no longer in a foreign land. . . . They rest today in the home of the arts and of genius, in the motherland of liberty and sacred equality, in the French Republic.”34

  Opposition to the looting was deemed unpatriotic. In October 1796, the official government newspaper Le Moniteur justified the action by invoking the Romans: “We form our taste precisely by long acquaintance with the true and the beautiful. The Romans, once uneducated, began to educate themselves by transplanting the works of conquered Greece to their own country. We follow their example when we exploit our conquests and carry off from Italy whatever serves to stimulate our imagination.”35

  To oversee the selection and transfer of Italy’s “monuments of interest,” the Directory appointed a Commission of Arts and Sciences. Members included the mathematician Gaspard Monge, botanist André Thouin, chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, painters Jean-Baptiste Wicar and Jean-Simon Berthélemy, sculptors Jean-Guillaume Moitte and Claude Dejoux, naturalist Jacques-Julien Labillardière and artist Jean-Pierre Tinet, who was assigned to join the Grande Armée in Tuscany. These commissioners followed Napoleon’s army, shipping the finest artworks to Paris.

  An armistice with the art-rich duchy of Parma and Piacenza in May 1796 yielded over twenty paintings including Correggio’s masterwork, Madonna with St. Jerome. The Duke of Modena ceded twenty paintings plus seventy manuscripts from his library. Bologna, part of the papal dominion, lost thirty-one paintings, one hundred prints, and over five hundred manuscripts. Ferrara gave up ten paintings. Milan, Verona, Perugia, Loreto, Pavia, Cento, Cremona, Pesaro, Fano, and Massa fell to France and were forced to give up art.

  In May 1797, Napoleon’s troops occupied Venice. On October 17, 1797, after five months of negotiations from his headquarters at the Villa Manin in Udine, Napoleon and the Austrians signed the Treaty of Campo Formio. The treaty validated the new Cisalpine Republic that adopted the French Constitution; the Venetian Republic was reduced to a province of the Austrian empire. Before the Austrians took possession of Venice, France’s commissars arrived to remove its treasures.

  Veroneses, Titians, and Tintorettos were ripped from the ceilings of the meeting rooms of the Council of Ten. Giovanni Bellini’s The Madonna and Child Enthroned from the Church of San Zaccaria and Titian’s masterpiece The Death of St Peter Martyr from Santi Giovanni e Paolo were also removed. The four bronze horses were lowered from the loggia of St. Mark’s by ropes onto carts, along with the winged lion of St. Mark’s square. By 1799, when France extended its reach to Florence and Turin, Napoleon boasted to the Directory: “We will have everything beautiful in Italy.”

  But the greatest prize of Napoleon’s Italian campaign was Rome. By the terms of the Armistice of Bologna on June 23, 1796: “The Pope shall deliver to the French Republic one hundred pictures, busts, vases, or statues at the choice of the commissioners who shall be sent to Rome, among which articles shall be particularly included the bronze bust of Junius Brutus and that in marble of Marcus Brutus, the two placed upon the Capitol, and five hundred manuscripts at the choice of the same commissioners.”36 The following February, the Treaty of Tolentino confirmed the terms of the plunder.

  In addition to recognizing the Directory as France’s legitimate government, Pope Pius VI was forced to pay an indemnity of twenty-one million livres (some sixty million dollars today), and surrender one hundred of Rome’s greatest artworks—eighty-three sculptures and seventeen paintings. Sixty-three of the sculptures would come from the Vatican; twenty from the Capitoline Museum (on the Capitoline Hill). Six paintings were removed from the Pinacoteca Vaticana, one from the Quirinale, two from the Capitoline Museum, five from Rome’s churches, and three from Umbria.

  To add insult to injury, Napoleon required the octogenarian pope to pay for the shipping of the art to Paris—another 800,000 livres (about 2.3 million dollars). That December, the murder of the popular French general Mathurin-Léonard Duphot gave the Directory an excuse to occupy Rome and proclaim it a republic. Napoleon demanded the pope erect a monument to Duphot along with a French diplomat killed in Rome in 1793, Nicolas de Basseville.

  On February 15, 1798, French troops marched into the city—the first foreign invasion since Charles V sacked Rome in 1527. Five days later, the partially paralyzed Pius VI was carted off over the Alps to Valence’s citadel, where he died the following August. After a reign of nearly a quarter of a century, his death certificate simply read: “Name: John Braschi. Occupation: pontiff.”37

  Along with his eighteenth-century predecessors, Pius VI had helped Rome reinvent itself as Europe’s undisputed cultural mecca. By the second half of the century, tourists, artists, and architects flocked to Rome, lured by the rediscovery of classical antiquity through archeological digs, monuments, and magnificent ruins. With its classical models, the papal capital was a must for the day’s artists and architects. As they had during the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, popes became avid art collectors and patrons.

  In the ensuing neoclassical craze, Rome lost many of its antiquities to foreign art collectors. To protect its cultural patrimony, Pope Clement XII opened the Capitoline Museum in 1734 with the acquisition of the renowned sculptures of his nephew, Cardinal Alessandro Albani. After restricting the export of antiquities, Pope Benedict XIV added more antiquities and founded the Capitoline picture gallery with the Sacchetti and Pio collections. Benedict also created the Museo Sacro at the Vatican’s Apostolic Library to house ivory and gold treasures from early Christianity. Pope Clement XIII formed the Profane Museum to showcase the Vatican’s secular treasures.

  Inspired by discoveries in Herculaneum and Pompeii, Pope Clement XIV began planning a museum devoted to antiquities in the Vatican’s Belvedere Villa where Leonardo da Vinci had lived for several years. Various thematic galleries branched out from Michelangelo Simonetti’s Octagonal Courtyard, including the Hall of Animals, Hall of the Muses, and Gallery of the Candelabra. The elegant Pio-Clementino opened in 1784, named for Clement and Pius VI who completed its twelve galleries. In 1790, Pius VI combined paintings from the Capitolina (founded in 1748 by Benedict XIV) and Quirinale to create the Vatican Pinacoteca, or picture gallery.

  Just eight years later, Rome was pillaged. Within two weeks of the signing of the Treaty of Tolentino, France’s cultural commissars arrived to pack up treasures from the Vatican and Capitoline Museums, along with churches, palaces, and private collections. In the same way ancient Rome’s generals had absconded with works by celebrated Greek sculptors like Praxiteles, Lysippos, and Pheidias, Paris now claimed Rome’s most famous statues, paintings
, manuscripts, and jewelry.

  Archivist Pierre Claude François Daunou was sent to Rome to supervise the removal of manuscripts from the Vatican Archives. Like the Roman general Sulla who sacked Athens in 86 B.C.E. and seized its finest library including works by Aristotle, Napoleon’s haul was spectacular. The loot included the Codex Vaticanus, a fourth-century parchment manuscript containing almost the entire Christian canon in Greek. The illustrated Vatican Virgil, created in Rome around 400 C.E., contained one of the oldest surviving copies of the Aeneid, the epic tale of Aeneas’s journey from Troy to Italy where he founded Rome. The manuscripts were confiscated on July 24, 1799, along with Pius VI’s private collection of manuscripts and incunabulum that he had boasted rivaled all private libraries of the day.38

  The Vatican’s Profane Museum was emptied of its coins, precious gems, and classical cameos. Among the prizes was the Apollo Belvedere, discovered in 1489 near Grottaferrata, Rome, and named for its specially designed niche in the Belvedere Courtyard. A second-century copy of a fourth-century B.C.E. bronze by the Greek sculptor Leochares, the marble depicts Apollo as an archer. Sketched and copied by Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and Dürer, the statue achieved icon status by the eighteenth century when it was seen as the ideal of aesthetic perfection. “Before this miracle of art I forget the entire universe,” raved German art historian Johann Winckelmann.39

  Also from the Belvedere, French commissars packed the monumental masterpiece Laocoön that Pliny the Elder called the most extraordinary work of painting or sculpture he’d ever seen. When it was accidentally discovered in a vineyard on Rome’s Esquiline Hill in 1506, the Laocoön was immediately recognized as the “miraculous” first-century Hellenistic work described by the Roman naturalist. Pope Julius II took Michelangelo’s advice and bought it. Carved out of a single marble slab, the work depicts the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being strangled by sea serpents sent by Apollo—punishment for the priest’s warning to the Trojans not to let the enormous wooden horse into their city.

  Snatched from the Sala Rotunda of the Vatican’s Pio-Clementino Museum was Jupiter d’Otricoli, a monumental marble bust of the king of the gods. Unearthed in a 1782 excavation sponsored by Pius VI at the ancient Ocriculum colony on Via Flaminia, the bust dates to the first half of the first century B.C.E. Thought to be the work of Paros with late eighteenth-century restorations, Jupiter is depicted with deep-set eyes, a deep horizontal wrinkle on his forehead, long strands of hair, and a thick beard. The model was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, Phidias’s ivory and gold Zeus from the temple of Olympia.

  Rome’s Capitoline Museum provided another twenty-one ancient masterworks. Among these was The Dying Gaul, an ancient Roman copy of a lost Hellenic sculpture (first or second century C.E.). Unearthed around 1622 in the gardens of the Villa Ludovisi on the Pincian Hill, the expressive statue carved in Greek marble depicts a warrior in his final moments, his face twisted in pain from the wound to his chest. The Capitoline Venus, discovered in the 1670s on the Quirinal Hill, was among the best preserved sculptures from Roman antiquity. Standing six feet six inches, the marble goddess sports a more elaborate coif and reversed pose than her celebrated model—Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Cnidos (circa 360 B.C.E.). For centuries, Praxiteles’s masterpiece adorned a shrine dedicated to the goddess of love at Cnidos on the Aegean Sea’s eastern shore. Later taken to Constantinople, Praxiteles’s statue was destroyed in a fire that swept the Byzantine capital in 475 C.E.

  Rome’s villas were also alluring targets. After the sale of his first antiquities collection to the Vatican in 1728, Cardinal Alessandro Albani assembled an even larger trove. To show off his new collection, he built the stately Villa Albani on the Via Solaria. French troops carted off 294 of the best works to Paris, including the Cardinal’s cherished Antinous bas-relief excavated at Hadrian’s Villa in 1735. A decade later, Jean-François de Troy, director of the French Academy in Rome, called the marble relief “of its kind one of the finest pieces of antiquity that can be found.”40

  Some of Rome’s finest altarpieces were also seized. These include Raphael’s Transfiguration, Caravaggio’s Deposition from the Chiesa Nuova, Andrea Sacchi’s Vision of Saint Romuald, Reni’s Martyrdom of Saint Peter, and Domenichino’s Last Communion of Saint Jerome. To the disappointment of French officials, Daniele da Volterra’s fresco Descent from the Cross could not be removed from the wall of Santissima Trinita dei Monti.41

  As in ancient Rome, not everyone in Paris was a fan of the state-sponsored plunder. The most eloquent opponent was Antoine Quatremère de Quincy. During the Revolution, he had overseen the transformation of the Church of Ste-Geneviève into the secular Panthéon. In Letters on the Plan to Abduct the Monuments of Italy, Quatremère protested “the removal of the art monuments from Italy, the dismemberment of her schools of art, and the despoiling of her collections, galleries, museums, etc. . . .” “Moreover, I believe it equally injurious to the 18th century to suspect it of being capable of reviving this Roman right of conquest that renders men and things the property of the strongest.”42

  Quatremère secured the signatures of some four dozen artists and architects for a petition urging the Directory to reconsider its appropriation of Italian art. Ironically, the supporters of the petition included a handful of Napoleon’s future propagandists—Dominique-Vivant Denon, painters Jacques-Louis David and his pupil Anne-Louis Girodet, and architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François Fontaine. A counter-petition was assembled, signed by a group of artists backing the art confiscations. “The French republic, by virtue of its strength, its superior enlightenment, and superior artists, is the only country in the world that can provide inviolable sanctuary for these masterpieces,” read the counter-petition published in the Moniteur Universel. At stake was “the instruction of the French people as a whole.”43

  In the end, the Directory’s confiscations continued. Many of Italy’s greatest paintings were removed from their stretchers, layered with padding, and rolled onto waxed cylinders; its renowned statues wrapped in plaster and straw. Specially built carts transported the irreplaceable cargo by land to Livorno, where a frigate carried the art to Marseilles. From there, the canvases traveled by barge up the Rhône, then the Centre and Brione canals, and the Seine. The outside of the cases were tarred and covered with wax cloth to protect against humidity and other conditions. The first of four wagon convoys left Rome in April, accompanied by painter Antoine-Jean Gros.44

  As a model for the upcoming Paris festival, organizers looked to Aemilius Paulus’s lavish three-day Roman triumph in 167 B.C.E. As Plutarch describes, on the first day of the triumph, crowds climbed scaffolding in the Circus Maximus and Forum to get a better view of the 250 wagons brimming with Macedonian booty, enemy armor, gold plate, and coins. The biggest prize was Macedonian king Perseus and his family. In arguing for the triumph, M. Servilius emphasized the ritual’s importance to Roman identity:

  “Are the many triumphs which have been celebrated over the Gauls, over the Spaniards, over the Carthaginians spoken of as pertaining merely to the generals themselves, or to the Roman People? Just as triumphs are celebrated, not merely over Pyrrhus or Hannibal, but over the people of Epirus or Carthage, so not Manius Curius or Publius Cornelius alone, but the Romans themselves celebrated the triumph.”45

  After four years of fighting and a battered economy, the Directory hoped that a parade of Italian war booty would improve morale and patriotism among Parisians just as it had for the Romans. “What could be more appropriate to revive and strengthen public spirit than to exhibit ceremonially to the French people this striking witness of its grandeur and its power?” the Institut asked.46

  France’s plunder was justified as part of a long historical tradition dating back to the Romans. In a speech to interior minister François de Neufchâteau, Thouin, one of the commissioners, described the looting as the continuation of a long historical tradition. “The Romans plundered the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Eg
yptians, accumulated [the sculptures] in Rome and other Italian cities; the fate of these productions of genius is to belong to the people who shine successively on earth by arms and by wisdom, and to follow always the wagons of the victors.”47

  The Directory also claimed that as heir to the ancient civilizations, only France could liberate art from tyranny and save the treasures from decay. “The Romans, once an uncultivated people, became civilized by transplanting to Rome the works of conquered Greece. . . . Thus the French people, naturally endowed with exquisite sensitivity, will, by seeing the models from antiquity, train its feeling and its critical sense. . . . The French Republic, by its strength and superiority of its enlightenment and its artists is the only country in the world which can give a safe home to these masterpieces.”48

  On the second day of the festival, with only military officials present, Neufchâteau presented the inventories of stolen art to the Directory at the Altar of Victory. From there, the sculpture and paintings were deposited at the Louvre. Natural history specimens went to the Jardin des Plantes; books and manuscripts to the Bibliothèque Nationale. The festival ended with a salvo of artillery, orchestras, fireworks, and speeches.

  But the triumphator wasn’t in Paris to accompany the parade of his war spoils. Like Julius Caesar and his successor Octavian, Napoleon Bonaparte was on his way to conquer Egypt.

  TWO

  THE LAND OF THE NILE

  On the morning of May 19, 1798, crowds gathered at the port of Toulon in southern France, waving goodbye to their loved ones. It was a scene no one would forget. To deafening canon fire and military marches, seventeen thousand soldiers boarded one hundred eighty ships anchored in the crowded bay. Convoys from other French ports would soon join the fleet, bringing the total military personnel to some thirty-four thousand soldiers and sixteen thousand sailors.