Portrait Mythology Antonio Canova's Portraits of the Bonapartes

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Portrait Mythology: Antonio Canova's Portraits of the Bonapartes Author(s): Christopher M. S. Johns Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 115-129Published by: . Sponsor: The Johns Hopkins University Press American Society for

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A RTRAIT4MYTHOLOGY: ANTONIO

CANOVA'S PORTRAITS OF THE

BONAPARTES

Christopher M. S. Johns

"It has been said, that if the body were naked, the face would be little regarded. "'

Portraits of significant individuals, the "players" of any given era, provide unique insight into a vital conjunction of history and art. Working from the assumption that people cared about the manner of their public presentation and that an image could be employed by a patron to serve a specific agenda, it stands to reason that much may be learned about the ideologies, the personal proclivities, and the historical circumstances that combined to encourage the production of a portrait. Highly programmatic portraits may approach the intensity of propaganda usually attributed to textual materials, but a portrait's status as a work of art more or less closely tied to inherited visual traditions sets it apart from the critical strategies devel- oped for the study of texts. Thus, any convincing explanation of a politicized portrait must draw deeply from both fields engaged by the image: history and art history. It is this fundamental interdisciplinarity that has given recent scholarship a more profound understanding of both art and history and has essentially redefined the role of visual culture in ideological discourse from passive reflector to active participant, with enor- mous implications for both primary disciplines. This article will consider politicized portraits of the Bonapartes by Antonio Canova both as works of art and as primary

CHRISTOPHER M. S. JOHNS is Associate Professor of Art History in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He has served as advisory editor for Eighteenth- Century Studies, and his book, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI, was published last year by Cambridge University Press.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 28, no. 1 (1994) Pp. 115-129.



116 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 28 / 1

historical documents in an attempt to understand in a more sophisticated way the visual and contextual functions of political portraiture in the Napoleonic period.

The representation of privileged individuals in the guise of mythological deities, demi-gods, and heroes was a salient feature of eighteenth-century portraiture, especially, but not exclusively, in France. These "mixed" portraits, which challenged the traditional academic undervaluing of portraits vis-al-vis history painting in the long-established hierarchy of the genres, are characteristic of a more widespread phenomenon in eighteenth-century visual culture that sought to subvert, or at least to reconfigure, the traditionally defined parameters of the various genres. This significant development is also seen in the emergence of the fete galante of Antoine Watteau, an invention so novel that a new genre had to be created for its reception into the Academie Royale. Such portraits as Jean-Marc Nattier's Madame de Caumartin as Hebe typify portrait mythology in Rococo France. As a lady of fashion, Caumartin is revealed as an object of desire to the male principle associated with the eagle, Jupiter's attribute. The sexual overtones of the elegant wine cup offered to the suspended bird of prey are obvious, and the passive versus active mating postures are carefully gendered. In this instance and in most images of this type, the mythological conceit maintains the respectability of the object while placing it firmly into the "loves of Jupiter" tradi- tion. Although usually associated with painting, portraiture cum mythology is also seen in contemporary sculpture, as numerous busts and full-length figures by Augustin Pajou, Jean-Jacques Caffieri, and Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert, among others, readily attest.2 Portrait mythology, however, was given its most politically engaged and influ- ential impetus by the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova, whose mythologized representations of several members of the usurping Bonaparte dynasty redefined the genre and did much to blur the remaining boundaries between history and portraiture. This article will consider two celebrated mythological portraits by Canova of members of the Imperial family, Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker (Figure 1) and Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix (Figure 2), in the new context of portrait mythology in the Napoleonic era. Such an investigation will, I believe, establish a political agenda for Canova and his patrons that removed such images from the realm of aristocratic chic and posi- tioned them in an ambiguous role in the political dialogue of contemporary Europe.

Like many artists of the neoclassical period, Canova found portraiture to be problematic. The great importance assigned to the sculptor's portraits of Napoleon and his sister Pauline in the artist's ceuvre is rather surprising when one considers the sculptor's oft-repeated aversion to the genre. Indeed, Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix may arguably be considered Canova's most celebrated work-it certainly is ubiquitous in introductory art history textbooks, and it was reproduced in bisque porcelain ad nauseum during the Victorian period. When Canova executed portraits of his own volition, they were always of individuals whom he admired and liked and were always done in the bust format. His sensitively observed Pope Pius VII Chiaramonti, executed as a token of esteem and given to the pontiff as a present, is a characteristic example.3 Canova apparently shared the inherited prejudice that stig- matized portraiture for its lack of invenzione and preferred to work in the mythological subject that belonged to the realm of history, which he thought to be the proper place for any serious artist. On a more profound level, Canova's reluctance to do portraits from life may be connected to his absolute refusal ever to copy ancient sculp-



117

FIGURE 1. Antonio Canova, Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, 1803-1806. London, Apsley House. (Photo: author.)



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JOHNS / Portrait Mythology 119

tures, a practice he considered artisanal rather than artistic. After the French removal of the Medici Venus from Florence for the Musee Napoleon, the Grand Duke of Tuscany approached Canova about making a copy of the celebrated antiquity for the Uffizi. The sculptor refused, citing his abhorrence of the copying procedure, and instead offered to create a new version entirely of his own invention, a plan that eventually led to the execution of the famed Venus Italica.4 Portraits form a very small percent- age of the sculptor's prodigious production, and mythologized portraits are a small minority even of these. Why, then, are his best-known Bonapartist portraits executed in mythological guise? Or might not "disguise" be a more accurate description?

The traditional response to this question has been that in making portraits with a mythological referent, Canova was attempting to elevate the work beyond portraiture to approach the more exalted excellencies of history. The desire to elevate portraiture in this manner is seen to advantage in the work of many of Canova's contemporaries, a good example being Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Three Graces is intentionally suggestive of mythology. Seen in a positive light, such a painting is a savvy adaptation of the artist's intellectual prefer- ences to the realities of British art patronage in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In a less optimistic reading, Lady Sarah Bunbury could be interpreted as a symptom of Reynolds's contempt for his own genre and as a symbol of frustrated academic ambition.5 As the demand for portraits increased dramatically almost ev- erywhere in Europe during the eighteenth century, and as portrait artists predictably rose in social status and professional visibility, it became increasingly difficult to rec- oncile academic belief in the relative inferiority of portraiture with the financial suc- cess and increasing public reputation enjoyed by its practitioners. This is what led to academic attempts to impose price ceilings on portraits, strictures designed to main- tain the hegemony of history. Despite persisting prejudice, such artists as Rosalba Carriera, Pompeo Batoni, Jean-Marc Nattier, and Thomas Gainsborough, to mention only a few, rose to positions of prominence in the academic system; all were primarily, if not exclusively, portrait painters. Such career paths would have been all but impossible for portrait specialists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Portrait mythology, then, was not only a compromise with the hierarchy of the genres but was also an assertion of the inventive capacities and new-found confidence of portraitists. But to return to the main question: Was the elevation of portraiture a central tenet of Canova's agenda when he selected a mythological premise for his portrait statues of Napoleon and Pauline? There is much evidence to indicate that it was not. I believe that Canova's reasons were essentially political, a motivation that places him into a different context from the majority of artists working in the mythological portrait genre.

Canova and many others in Italy, France, and elsewhere recognized the negative effect that revolution had on public portrait sculpture. To be sure, revo- lutions and popular unrest usually affected public sculpture far more seriously than painting, a phenomenon perhaps not so generally appreciated as it might be. The colonial revolt in America destroyed a full-length statue of George III in New York City, while the iconoclasm visited on Marxist-Leninist images in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been depressingly documented on the evening news. Re- lated to the practice of hanging or burning in effigy, portrait sculpture, when serving a regimist agenda in its original conception, may become the focus of political vio-




lence when the policies of the regime are discredited. Canova intuited this as much as he articulated it, and the choice of mythological disguise for Napoleon and even for Pauline was largely motivated by a wish to protect his works for posterity. There were good reasons for so doing.

During the revolutionary upheavals in 1797 and 1798 in Venice and Rome, the Venetian sculptor was profoundly shocked by the destruction of works of art and other cultural properties. After the Treaty of Campoformio, in which France ceded the Veneto to Austria in return for Lombardy, the French evacuation of Venice was marred by widespread looting and iconoclasm. The Doge's archives, city churches, and some private palaces were ransacked; the Arsenal was looted; and, most deplor- ably, the lion of Saint Mark and the bronze horses of the basilica were pulled down and sent to Paris. As a final humiliation to the city, the ceremonial barge of the Doge, the Bucintoro, was burned in order to retrieve its gold gilding.6 A year later it was Rome's turn. French troops pillaged the Vatican and Quirinal palaces, and many li- brary volumes were destroyed in order to remove the gold lettering from the bindings. Church plate and vestments suffered appalling losses, the former melted down for precious metals and the latter burnt for their gold and silver threads. All over the city, the French toppled papal portrait statues, coats of arms, and commemorative plaques. The most noteworthy loss was the statue of Ignatius of Loyola in the Gesiu, a magnifi- cent life-size image of the saint, which had been executed in solid silver at the end of seventeenth century by the French sculptor Pierre Legros. It was melted down for specie. After the restoration of Pius VII and the revival of the Society of Jesus, Canova was commissioned to make a silver-plate replica of the lost statue on Legros's original designs. It is the only instance I know of in which he consented to make a copy.7 Thus, Canova recognized the vulnerability of works of art, especially politically compromised public sculpture, and took positive steps to neutralize, as far as possible, the politics of his Bonapartist portraits. Mythology was the camouflage.

Although the iconoclasm and random violence against works of art in Italy were deplored by Canova, he also recognized the ideological underpinning of such revolutionary action from his familiarity with state-supported image breaking. The French Revolution had formed an immediate and compelling precedent that sys- tematically attacked politically unpopular art, especially portraits, and it was ultimately a greater threat to monuments than isolated social upheavals. The widespread destruction of royalist portrait sculpture and ecclesiastical imagery in all parts of France was a source of deep concern to Canova and to many other artists. Prominent among the losses was Edme Bouchardon's equestrian statue of Louis XV that formerly stood in the Place Louis Quinze, a bronze statue known to Canova through an engraving.8 Significantly, Bouchardon was one of the few eighteenth-century sculptors whom Canova admired. The destruction of dynastic monuments and the desecration of the royal tombs at St. Denis profoundly shocked moderate European opinion, and the decapitation of jamb figures representing the kings and queens of France on medieval portals was widely associated with Revolutionary justice by the guillotine, an instru- ment in increasing use after 1791. Based on his first-hand experience of the destruction of art in Italy and his knowledge of government-sponsored iconoclasm in Revo- lutionary France, it seems reasonable to assume that the sculptor would take precau- tionary steps when creating images of so controversial a regime as that of the




Bonapartes. Indeed, the mythological or allegorical veneer used in all his full-length portraits of the family was repeated in only one non-Imperial statue, the standing King Ferdinand IV of Naples, depicted in a gender-bending role as Minerva. Quite possibly, this suggests the artist thought that portrait statues of the Imperial family might prove attractive targets for popular violence at some future date. Considering recent events in France, Italy, and elsewhere, this was not a particularly remarkable conclusion. Subsequent events proved Canova to have been prophetic.

Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker was the result of a portrait commission given to Canova by Napoleon in 1802, when the latter was still First Consul.9 The famous sculptor had first come to Napoleon's attention during the Italian cam- paigns of 1796-1797, when the victorious general wrote to Canova in highly flatter- ing terms. It was Bonaparte who assured Canova of his protection and the inviolabil- ity of his Roman studio following the artist's flight from Rome after the overthrow of the papal government of Pius VI in 1798. Despite these official blandishments, the sculptor resisted French approaches, stating flatly that he could not cooperate with the man or the government that had destroyed the independence of the Republic of Venice. Another grievance of Canova, carefully nurtured, was the spoliation of the masterpieces of the major northern and central Italian art collections, including those of the ex-Doge and the Papacy. Napoleon was equally resolved to have Canova ex- ecute his portrait as a symbol of cultural ambition to crown political and military achievement. The possession of Cupid and Psyche by the First Consul's brother-in- law, Joachim Murat, purchased from Canova after the French war with Britain made it impossible to deliver the sculpture to Colonel Campbell, its original patron, further encouraged Napoleon's desire to obtain a work from the hand of the most celebrated artist in Europe. For several months in 1802, Canova resisted the summons to Paris. No excuse, however feeble, was uninvoked in the artist's attempt to avoid doing Napoleon's portrait; poor health, too many commissions, inclement weather, and the questionable conditions of the roads were all cited in turn. The real reasons were less politically viable. In addition to a general aversion to portraiture, Canova was unen- thusiastic about the French, whom he saw as violent and anticlerical. His patriotic feelings as an Italian, though ambiguous, were pronounced, and he resented French depredations in Italy and the jealousy of French artists and critics in Paris.10 Finally, at the urgent pleading of Cardinal Consalvi, the papal Secretary of State, and Pius VII, who did not want to antagonize Napoleon during the negotiations for the Concor- dat,1" Canova agreed to go, arriving at the chateau of Fontainebleau in October for a number of life sittings. The result was a bust portrait (Figure 3), now existing in several versions, which was used as a model for the head of Napoleon as Mars. Bonaparte was pleased with the bust modello, which the sculptor completed before his return to Rome.

While in France for the sittings, Canova discussed his conceit for the portrait statue and expressed his intention to present the modern Mars in the "heroic altogether." Napoleon's initial reaction to the proposed nudity was negative; he preferred to be represented in his regimental uniform. There were recent prece- dents in French full-length portrait sculpture for the commemoration of military heroes in modern dress, the most famous being Jean-Antoine Houdon's George Wash- ington, executed for the state capitol building in Richmond, Virginia. Contemporary



122 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 28 /1

FIGURE 3. Antonio Canova, Napoleon as First Consul, 1803. Florence, Palazzo Pitti. (Photo: author.)

dress for historical subjects in painting had been popularized in the previous genera- tion by Benjamin West's Death of General Wolfe, but Canova dismissed this sugges- tion, arguing for the authority of the ancients in the use of nudity to immortalize superior achievement. In addition, the sculptor insisted that the sophistication of the concept and the self-conscious appeal to history that Napoleon himself desired could be achieved by the classic, universal quality that only nudity could express. In reject- ing modern dress, the sculptor told Bonaparte that "God himself would not have been able to create a beautiful work of art if he had represented Your Majesty as you are . ., dressed in the French fashion."12 After a great deal of persuasion, Napoleon acquiesced to what he described as the artist's supreme understanding. Bonaparte lived to regret the decision.

Canova began the modello for Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker shortly after he completed the marble portrait head, in early 1803. The marble statue's, realization was to prove a long and tiresome process, as indicated by complaints about

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JoHNs / Portrait Mythology 123

FIGURE 4. Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Ossian Receiving the Shades of Napoleon's Officers, 1802. Malmaison, Musee National du Chateau. (Photo: author.)

unusual for the sculptor and seem not to have been at all assuaged by the stupendous sum of 60,000 francs promised for the statue. The choice of Mars the Peacemaker as the mythological concetto was Canova's, but his decision must have been influenced by the recent peace treaties of Luneville in 1801 between France and Austria and of Amiens in 1802, the year of the commission, that briefly halted the war with Britain. To my knowledge, it has never been considered that the irenic references of Canova's statue relate the work to another Napoleonic commission for his private residence at the chateau de Malmaison of the same year: Anne-Louis Girodet's Ossian Receiving the Shades of Napoleon's Officers (Figure 4). The suspended eagle and cock in Girodet's picture refer to the cessation of hostilities between Austria and France, respectively, and the reception of the fallen French officers by Ossian could also be interpreted as a visualization of reconciliation. As Canova was a peace-loving conservative who shared Pius VII's wish to prevent future wars, the choice of a pacifying Mars as a mythological referent to Napoleon was both logical and appropriate. There was discussion in Rome about this conceit for the First Consul's portrait statue, however, even before Canova accepted the commission. In a letter from the French ambassador Cacault in




Rome to Talleyrand of 8 December 1801, the diplomat mentions the discussions about the subject to Napoleon's chief minister: "Many diverse projects have been conceived for the statue of Bonaparte. The idea of Canova of representing him in the guise of Mars disarmed and peace-bringing is spoken of."'3 Cacault, who was in a position to know, states that the conception was Canova's, and there seems to be little room for doubt that such was indeed the case. But was a monument to the Napoleonic peace the artist's sole motivation?

It may be argued that Canova's wish to present Napoleon as a nude Roman god had a subversive subtext. Indeed, Lucien Bonaparte, in self-imposed exile in Rome, told Canova when he saw the statue in the sculptor's studio that Mars seemed more minatory than pacific. In a similar political vein, Lord Bristol suppos- edly quipped that he could not find England on Napoleon's globe.14 The political component was closely related to the question of nudity and, significantly, to issues of national taste and the reception of works of art. Although Italians had long been used to representations of rulers in mythological guise and to nudity in public sculpture, the French public was not so inured. The First Consul's initial squeamishness on the question of nudity may have been partly motivated by an appreciation of French inexperience of public sculpture in the buff, for he was certainly not lacking in personal vanity. Napoleon may have had in mind the objections made to a proposed nude portrait monument to the slain General Desaix, a bronze standing monument executed for the Place des Victoires by Claude Dejoux in 1805-1807.15 In any event, EugZene de Beauharnais, Napoleon's stepson and Viceroy in Milan, did not hesitate to commission a bronze replica of Canova's marble for the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.16 Although the bronze pedestrian statue's place of exhibition was the subject of controversy, it does not seem to have been because of its nudity. It is still displayed in the courtyard of the Brera Museum, a cultural institution directed by Canova's friend Giuseppe Bossi, which had been established during the reign of Napoleon as King of Italy. When Canova received the commission for the original Napoleon as Mars, it had not been determined where in Paris the statue would be erected, but the ancient sculpture gallery in the Musee Napoleon, where the spoils of Italy were on display, seemed a likely place.17 In addition to Canova's wish to have his work seen as a modern masterpiece among its ancient counterparts, might the artist not also have been subtly parodying Napoleon, making him a contemporary, uncomfortable presence among his subjects because of his nudity? Surely such a monument, with its preten- sions to deified status and its connections to august artistic lineage, must have been recognized as a rejection, in cultural terms, of the achievements of the Revolution.

The Napoleon as Mars was completed in 1806, but it did not reach its destination for almost five years, after Canova's second visit to Paris in 1810 to make a study for a portrait of the new Empress Marie Louise, in the guise of Concord. The packing and shipment of the monument presented immense and expensive prob- lems. The route over the Apennines and the Alps was judged too hazardous, but the sea route from Ostia to Toulon and then by canal and river to Paris was dangerous, due to possible storms and probable pursuit by the British fleet. Napoleon ultimately ordered the work to be sent by water, but stipulated that the crate should be so placed on the ship that it could be jettisoned in the event of enemy capture. The emperor's




extreme concern that the statue not fall into English hands possibly indicates continuing concern for the public reception of his portrait as a monumental nude. Safely passing Genoa, Toulon, and Lyon, the sculpture reached Paris on the first day of 1811.18

Long before the arrival of Napoleon as Mars in France, Canova, in vatic fashion, correctly predicted a hostile reaction from the French critics. Always hypersensitive to criticism, the sculptor wrote to his only French friend, Quatremere de Quincy, on 29 November 1806, shortly after the completion of the sculpture. The letter is defensive and uncharacteristically bitter, so much so that its author begged its recipient to burn it after reading: "The statue of the Emperor will one day come to Paris; it will be criticized without pity, and I know it: it will certainly have its defects, above all the others it will have the disgrace of being modern and by an Italian." 19 In this missive, the sculptor isolated the two main objections to his art that he perceived to be endemic in French criticism: first, that no modern work can be compared favor- ably with the canonical masterworks of ancient sculpture, and second, that French chauvinism prevented Canova from enjoying the same degree of fame in France that he had achieved elsewhere. Except for the Bonapartes, Canova never received a sub- stantial commission from a French patron; at least, not one that he accepted. With few exceptions, French artists were jealous of the favoritism shown an Italian artist by the government and the dynasty. The aspersions cast on Napoleon as Mars must have confirmed Canova's worst suspicions about French taste and the politicization of their art patronage.

Of all the French critics, the one who really mattered was Napo- leon, and Canova must have felt the irony of the patron's rejection of a sculpture that the artist had been less than enthusiastic about making. On 12 April 1811, the emperor finally came to see the statue and decreed its immediate banishment to storage, specifically ordering that access be limited only to a handful of artists. Three weeks later, Quatremere wrote again to Rome, suggesting that the political situation was unfavorable to the public exhibition of the monument, doubtless hoping to assuage the sensitive artist's feelings.20 Napoleon, when directly confronted by the image, must have realized that the changes that had taken place in his physical appearance during the last nine years would preclude display, thus avoiding public scrutiny and possible derision. A war-weary France was demanding a new image of its ruler as a statesman and benevolent father, rather than as a superhuman warrior. In any event, he realized that there was little political advantage to be gained by the work's exhibition, and the statue became a source of embarrassment until its sale to the British government by Louis XVIII. No work by "the new Phidias" had ever been treated in such a manner. But the myth that Napoleon wished Canova to create with his chisel was the real loser. After its acquisition from France, the Napoleon as Mars was presented by the British government to the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo, and it is still a "captive" of the stair balusters in Apsley House.

While most observers in France blamed Canova for making the figure of Napoleon more like an athlete or a gladiator than a warrior deity, Quatremere, Francois Gerard, and, somewhat surprisingly, Jacques-Louis David, were among its




admirers.21 David had once advised young artists to avoid emulation of Canova because it would soften and ornamentalize their styles, so his unprompted tribute must have been sincere. In a letter to Canova dated 27 June 1811, David wrote from Paris:

You have made a beautiful figure representing the Emperor Napo- leon, you have made for posterity all that a mortal can make: the calumny that clings to it disregard, allow to mediocrity its little ha- bitual consolation. The work is there, it represents the Emperor Na- poleon, and it is Canova who has made it. That is all there is to be said.22

Hostile reactions in Paris notwithstanding, the mythological disguise and the emphatic nudity of Napoleon as Mars did achieve one of Canova's goals: critical reaction was almost entirely limited to aesthetic rather than to political issues. The captious carped on various faults in the anatomy, and the usually dismiss- ive critic Carl Ludwig Fernow, the Nordic Champion of Canova's arch-rival Bertel Thorvaldsen, only mentioned the portrait, complimenting the likeness. It was as if Napoleon were a disembodied afterthought to the Mars, as if Napoleon had placed his head onto a pasteboard photographic strongman at a beach resort. In sum, mythology successfully triumphed over the political possibilities and helped limit discourse to artistic qualities. In separating aesthetics from politics, Canova departed decisively from the traditions of patron-imposed iconographies and interpretations, allowing meaning to devolve onto the artist. Although the monument was not a suc- cess for either the artist or the patron, it stands as a milestone in the reformulation of the traditional relationship between the patron and the artist. In breaking with past practice, Antonio Canova made a vital contribution to the development of modern art.23

Canova's other major Bonapartist portrait, the reclining representation of the emperor's favorite sister, Pauline Borghese, was also conceptualized as a marble nude in mythological guise, this time as Venus Victrix, holding the golden apple of Paris as the winner of antiquity's most celebrated beauty pageant. Ostensibly commissioned by Prince Camillo Borghese in 1804, in fact it was very much his wife's project. Canova insisted on a mythological conceit as he had with Napoleon, and suggested Diana, but Pauline declared that it must be Venus. As the most physically attractive of Napoleon's sisters and as a woman who enjoyed a European reputation for boudoir intrigue, perhaps she knew best. Pauline's social position and personal charms made her, for a time, the unofficial queen of Rome, but her loud complaints about her husband's impotence and her amorous adventures soon earned her the so- briquet "Messalina of the Empire."24 During the period of the statue's execution, from 1804 to 1808, Pauline and Camillo became estranged, but it was he who became the eventual proprietor of the monument. It seems more than coincidental that Prince Borghese restricted access to the statue in the same way that his brother-in-law made it very difficult for the curious to see his portrait by Canova. Could a nude depiction of so famous a person also have been problematic for Borghese, or could there have been a hint from his Imperial relation, who was always extremely sensitive about the family's public image? It should be considered, however, that the Pauline Borghese as




Venus Victrix was to be a private work, while Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker was to have a public function. The choice of nudity and the use of portrait mythology are what inexorably connect the two statues. Like the Napoleon as Mars, Pauline as Venus uses mythology to create ambiguity of interpretation, distancing the work from political commitment. And if one looks for subversion in the statues executed for the Bonapartes by Canova, the Herculean nudity of the Mars as an idealized body for the slight, fleshy, and shortish Corsican has real possibilities, not to mention the oxymoronic notion of Mars the peacemaker. Similarly, a woman with Pauline Borghese's reputation shown reclining in bed like a neoclassical Olympia might be seen as a type of moral condemnation, even if the artist had, in this instance, been greatly encouraged by the patron.

As an artist hypersensitive to criticism and almost neurotically ob- sessed with his contemporary fame and his place in art history, Antonio Canova was infinitely more concerned with the physical safety and universal appeal of his statues than he was in serving any patron's political agenda. This has been seen as evidence of Canova's political neutrality or indifference, but this is untrue. Realizing the necessity of working for the competing elites of Europe in order to increase his reputation and to be continually employed in an impoverished and increasingly peripheralized Rome, Canova understood the expediency of working even for Napoleon, whose policies he usually found abhorrent. In his practice of working for many, he alienated few, a tribute to his art and to his fame. It is also true that the artist at least partly understood the power of his position. As a cultural arbiter of unprecedented authority, he comprehended art's ability to influence events and the artist's opportunity to become a historical actor rather than a passive reflector of his patrons' ideologies. Leopoldo Cicognara, one of Canova's biographers, recognized the artist's role in a letter to his friend in Rome, dated 19 September 1812:

And, then, you are a true power in this world, and you do not know, however, the force that you have, then perhaps you would be able to make yourself more conspicuous. Notwithstanding, you have a glory common to such extraordinary powers; namely, that of having made a revolution in the arts like the military powers have made in politics.25

In the politically problematic realm of full-length portraiture of the Bonapartes, Canova found mythology to be a useful tool to create interpretative ambiguity and to downplay the political aspect of the works, in large measure removing such compromised objects from the arena of political discourse. In so doing, he exer- cised a degree of control over the meaning of his creations that was unprecedented and that forever changed the relationship of the artist to the patron. In Canova's Bonapartist images, portrait mythology came full circle. Its Rococo role had been to increase the prestige of the sitter by association with a shared aristocratic cultural heritage. Canova insisted on mythology as a genre all but unrelated to the aspirations of his individual sitters.




NOTES

I wish to thank Fred Licht and Jane Gladstone for their help and encouragement in my continuing work on Canova. I also thank Dorothy Johnson, Mary Sheriff, and the participants in the "Revisions of Mythology" session at the 1994 ASECS meeting in Charleston for their comments. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

1. Peter Beckford, Familiar Letters from Italy to a Friend in England, (London, 1805), 2:105.

2. A well-known example by Pajou, The Princess of Hesse-Homburg as Minerva, of 1761, is conve- niently illustrated in Michael Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700-1789 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 155.

3. For Canova's attitudes about portrait sculpture and for an illustration of Pope Pius VII, see Fred Licht, Canova (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), 120-25.

4. On the issue of copying, see Seymour Howard, "Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and the Origins of Neo- Classic Sculpture," Art Quarterly 33 (1970): 120-33, with additional bibliography. For the Venus Italica, see especially Hugh Honour, "Canova's Statues of Venus," Burlington Magazine 114 (1972): 658-70.

5. On Reynolds's notion of the elevation of portraiture and the Grand Manner, see Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), xxxii-xxxv, with appropriate references to the individual discourses.

6. Among the losses were the splendid Gothic walnut choir stalls from Santa Maria dell'Orto, which were used to make a bonfire for the French troops. Giovanni De Castro, Storia d'Italia dal 1799 al 1814, 2 vols. (Milan: F. Vallardi, 1907), 1:285-88.

7. For a contemporary account of the sack, see Richard Duppa, A Journal of the Most Remarkable Occurrences that took place in Rome upon the Subversion of the Ecclesiastical Government, in 1798 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799).

8. On the political engagement of portrait sculpture before the Revolution, see Jeffrey Merrick, "Poli- tics on Pedestals: Royal Monuments in Eighteenth-Century France," French History 5 (1991): 234-64. See also Stephen Rombouts, "Art as Propaganda in Eighteenth-Century France: The Paradox of Edme Bouchardon's Louis XV," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1993-94): 255-82. The engraving after the lost statue is illustrated on page 258.

9. On the statue, see especially Ferdinand Boyer, "L'histoire du 'Napol6on colossal' de Canova," Revue des 1tudes Napoleoniennes (1940): 189-99; Hugh Honour, "Canova's 'Napoleon'," Apollo 98 (1973): 180-84; and Christopher M. S. Johns, "Canova's Portraits of Napoleon: Mixed Genre and the Question of Nudity in Revolutionary Portraiture," The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe: Proceed- ings 1989, eds. Donald D. Horward and John C. Horgan (Tallahassee, Fla.: Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, Florida State Uniersity, 1990), 368-82.

10. Andr6 Fugier, Napol6on et l'Italie (Paris: J. B. Janin, 1947), 275-77.

11. Gaetano Giucci, Storia della vita e del pontificato di Pio VII, 2 vols. (Rome: G. Chiassi, 1857), 1:120-21.

12. Quoted in Jean Chatelain, Dominique Vivant Denon et le Louvre de Napoleon (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1973), 143. The Director of the Mus6e Napol6on, Denon strongly encouraged Napo- leon to allow the statue to be nude. Ironically, he later become one of Canova's bitterest enemies.

13. The letter bears the Revolutionary calendar date 17 frimaire, An 10. The French text reads: "II a 6t6 consu divers projets de la statue de Bonaparte. On a parl6 de l'id6e de Canova de le repr6senter sous la figure de Mars d6sarm6 et pacificateur." Quoted in Anatole de Montaiglon and Jules Guiffrey, eds., Correspondance des Directeurs de l'Acade'mie de France a Rome avec les Surintendants des Batiments publi6e d'apres les manuscrits des Archives Nationales, (Paris: Charavay Freres, 1887-1912), 17:336-37.

14. Boyer, 193-94. Lucien went on to question Canova's sincerity in agreeing to make the statue, ask- ing how the artist could immortalize the destroyer of the Serene Republic, Canova's homeland. The sculptor answered that his signature on the base, "Canova da Venezia," said it all.




15. For this monument and the issue of public nudity, see Horst W. Janson, "Observations on Nudity in Neoclassical Art," 16 Studies (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1973), 191-92. The monument was melted down during the Restoration and Louis XVIII ordered the bronze used for the restored monument to Henri IV, which had been melted down during the Revolution.

16. For the Brera bronze replica, see Licht, 101-3, illustrated as Figures 69, 70, and 71.

17. It was suggested that the statue should be placed in the Senate, but in a letter of 15 April 1811 from Vivant Denon to Canova (significantly written before Napoleon himself had seen the sculpture), the Di- rector argued for exposition in the museum, probably in the Salle des Antiquit6s. The letter is quoted in Ferdinand Boyer, "II y a deux cents ans naissait Canova," Revue des 1btudes italiennes (1957): 230-35.

18. Marie-Louise Biver, "Le 'Napol6on' de Canova," La Revue des Deux Mondes (1 April 1963), 427.

19. "VerrA un giorno a Parigi la statuta dell'Imperatore; sara criticata senza pieta, e lo so: avra i suoi difetti certamente, sopra gli altri avra la disgrazia di essere moderna e di un Italiano." Quoted by Ferdinand Boyer, "Canova, sculpteur de Napol6on," in Le monde des arts en Italie et la France de la Revolution et de l'Empire, Biblioteca di Studi Francesi, 4 (Turin: Societi Editrice Internazionale, 1969), 145.

20. A letter from Quatremere de Quincy, dated Passy-pres-Paris, 3 May 1811, to Canova, quoted in A. Valmarana, ed., Lettere scelte dell'inedito epistolario di Antonio Canova (Vicenza, 1854), 69.

21. This is mentioned by most of Canova's early biographers, including Giovanni Rosini, Saggio sulla vita e sulle opere di Antonio Canova, 2nd ed., (Pisa: N. Capurra, 1830), 42.

22. Lettere inedite tratte dagli autografi Canoviani nel Museo Civico di Bassano, Nozze Chiminelli- Bonuzzi (Bassano, 1891), 7-8. Canova wrote a letter of thanks to David on 8 August 1811, acknowledg- ing that such praise was not given lightly. The French text of David's letter reads: "Vous avez fait une belle figure repr6sentant l'Empereur Napol6on. Vous avez fait pour la post6rit6 tout ce qu'un mortel pouvoit faire: la calomnie s'y accroche, cela ne Vous regarde plus, laissez a la m6diocrite sa petite consolation habituelle. L'ouvrage est la, il represente l'Empereur Napol6on, et c'est Canova qui l'a fait. C'est tout dire." For more on the relationship between Napoleonic Europe's two most famous artists, see Hugh Honour, "Canova and David," Apollo 96 (1972): 312-17.

23. Licht, 155.

24. Maurice Andrieux, Les Franqais a Rome (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 286-89. See also Licht, 130-43.

25. Cicognara's letter was written from Florence. Quoted in Leopoldo Cicognara, Lettere ad Antonio Canova, ed. Gianni Venturi (Urbino: Argalii, 1973), 22. The Italian text reads: "E poi voi siete una vera potenza in questo mondo, e non conoscete per6 la forza che avete, che forse potresti intuonar (sic) molto piui d'alto. Null'ostante avete una gloria comune alle potenze straordinarie, quella cioe d'aver fatta una rivoluzione nelle arti, come le potenze militare le fanno nella politica."



Documents

Portrait Mythology Antonio Canova's Portraits of the Bonapartes