by this time Napoleon had under his wing as court favourites Pierre-Paul
Prud'hon, whose sensual allegories were very much to his liking and who
was the art director of the great fetes given in Paris in the Emperor's
honour, and the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova, whose statue of
Pauline Bonaparte, semi-nude, first suggested to the world the lubricious
charms that had enslaved cohorts of men.
There was a neo-classical 'Empire style' too in sculpture, architecture,
interior design and fashion where the inspiration was predominantly the
art of antiquity or the Orient. Clothes fo llowed the same pattern: colours
were dark and materials heavy, partly to produce an impression of
sumptuousness but also partly, said the cynics, to supply more work for
the textile industry. Men's clothes were still influenced by the
Revolution, while the frock-coat, tail-coat and straight waistcoat gave the
connotation of military uniform. In some ways the military effect on
fa shion was even more noticeable with women's clothes: hair was piled up
high in the fo rm of a shako, skirts were straight and cut like a scabbard,
and boots, epaulettes and crossbelts were worn.
Napoleon's taste was fo r the monumental and the classical as a
conscious aping of the grandeur that was Rome, but the art of the
Imperial period was nothing like so monolithic as this brief sketch
indicates; the best known exception is the 'Romantic' work of Gericault,
but there were other examples. It was in any case difficult to insist on a
'politically correct' art when Napoleon's own conception of Empire was
so confused. His desire to be a Roman emperor was yet another in the
long series of irrational and unintegrated urges to which there is no
reason not to give the traditional name 'complex'. Thus, in addition to
'complexes' about his mother, his brother, his wife and the Orient,
Napoleon had an attitude towards Empire that was irrational at many
different levels.
Bedazzled by the great conquerors of the past, Napoleon could never
quite decide which of them he wanted to emulate. When fusing the
imperial and ancien regime elites in France he was Alexander the Great,
when crossing the Alps he was Hannibal, when berating his family he was
Genghiz Khan. Even as a strictly Roman Emperor there was confusion,
with Napoleon caught between the perspectives of the Julio-Claudians
and the Holy Roman Empire: so his campaign in Italy in 1796-4J7 was
analogous to Caesar's campaigns in Gaul as a self-conscious prelude to
supreme power, but the fo rms and traditions he worked with once he had
attained that power were those of Charlemagne. He made this clear by
visiting Aix-la-Chapelle, ancient capital of the Frankish Emperor, in
September r8o4, and by adding the iron crown of Lombardy (once more
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(Marcin)
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