Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker is a colossal
heroic nudeHeroic nudity or ideal nudity is a concept in classical scholarship to describe the use of nudity in classical sculpture to indicate that a sculpture's apparently mortal human subject is in fact a hero or semi-divine being. This convention began in archaic and classical Greece and was later adopted...
statue by the Italian artist
Antonio CanovaAntonio Canova was an Italian sculptor who became famous for his marble sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh...
of
Napoleon I of FranceNapoleon Bonaparte later known as Napoleon I, and previously Napoleone di Buonaparte, was a military and political leader of France whose actions shaped European politics in the early 19th century.Born in Corsica and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France, Bonaparte rose to prominence...
in the guise of the Roman god
MarsMars was the Roman god of war, the son of Juno and Jupiter, husband of Bellona, and the lover of Venus. He was the most prominent of the military gods that were worshipped by the Roman legions. The martial Romans considered him second in importance only to Jupiter...
. He holds a gilded
NikeIn Greek mythology, Nike , was a goddess who personified triumph throughout the ages of the ancient Greek culture. She is known as the Winged Goddess of Victory. The Roman equivalent was Victoria...
or Victory standing on a globe in his right hand and a staff in his left. It was produced between 1802 and 1806 and stands 3.45 metres to the raised left hand. Once on display in the
LouvreThe Musée du Louvre or officially the Grand Louvre — in English, the Louvre Museum or Great Louvre, or simply the Louvre — is the largest national museum of France, the most visited museum in the world, and a historic monument. It is a central landmark of Paris, located on the Right Bank of the...
in Paris, it was purchased from Louis XVIII in 1816 by the British government, which granted it to the
Duke of WellingtonField Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, KP, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS , was an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and political figures of the nineteenth century....
.
Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker is a colossal
heroic nudeHeroic nudity or ideal nudity is a concept in classical scholarship to describe the use of nudity in classical sculpture to indicate that a sculpture's apparently mortal human subject is in fact a hero or semi-divine being. This convention began in archaic and classical Greece and was later adopted...
statue by the Italian artist
Antonio CanovaAntonio Canova was an Italian sculptor who became famous for his marble sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh...
of
Napoleon I of FranceNapoleon Bonaparte later known as Napoleon I, and previously Napoleone di Buonaparte, was a military and political leader of France whose actions shaped European politics in the early 19th century.Born in Corsica and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France, Bonaparte rose to prominence...
in the guise of the Roman god
MarsMars was the Roman god of war, the son of Juno and Jupiter, husband of Bellona, and the lover of Venus. He was the most prominent of the military gods that were worshipped by the Roman legions. The martial Romans considered him second in importance only to Jupiter...
. He holds a gilded
NikeIn Greek mythology, Nike , was a goddess who personified triumph throughout the ages of the ancient Greek culture. She is known as the Winged Goddess of Victory. The Roman equivalent was Victoria...
or Victory standing on a globe in his right hand and a staff in his left. It was produced between 1802 and 1806 and stands 3.45 metres to the raised left hand. Once on display in the
LouvreThe Musée du Louvre or officially the Grand Louvre — in English, the Louvre Museum or Great Louvre, or simply the Louvre — is the largest national museum of France, the most visited museum in the world, and a historic monument. It is a central landmark of Paris, located on the Right Bank of the...
in Paris, it was purchased from Louis XVIII in 1816 by the British government, which granted it to the
Duke of WellingtonField Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, KP, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS , was an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and political figures of the nineteenth century....
. It is now on display in the Adam's Stairwell at the Duke's London residence of
Apsley HouseApsley House, also known as Number One, London, was the London residence of the Dukes of Wellington and stands alone at Hyde Park Corner, on the south-east corner of Hyde Park, facing south towards the busy traffic circulation system...
.
History
At Napoleon's personal request, Canova came to Paris in 1802 to model a bust of him, before returning to Rome to work on the full sculpture. Its idealised nude physique draws on the iconography of
AugustusGaius Julius Caesar Augustus was the first emperor of the Roman Empire, which he ruled alone from 27 BC until his death in AD 14.
[These are the contemporary dates; Augustus lived under two calendars, the Roman Republican until 45 BC, and the Julian after 45 BC...]
(a comparable nude sculpture of another member of the Bonaparte family is Canova's
Venus Victrix"Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix" is a semi-nude life-size reclining neo-Classical portrait sculpture by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova...
of
Pauline BonaparteMarie Paulette Bonaparte, Princesse Française, Princess and Duchess of Guastalla was the younger and favorite sister of Napoleon I of France.-Before Napoleon's rise to power:...
), and it was always intended for an interior entrance-hall setting rather than a freestanding piazza sculpture. France's ambassador in Rome
François CacaultFrançois Cacault was a French diplomat of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.-Life:François's father was a master artist in faience, road engineer and designer of a 1775 map of Nantes which served as the basis for plans to embellish the town...
and museum director Vivant Denon both saw the sculpture whilst it was a work in progress - the former wrote in 1803 that it "must become the most perfect work of this century", whilst Denon wrote back to Napoleon in 1806 that it belonged indoors in the Musee Napoleon "among the emperors and in the niche where the
LaocoonThe statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group, is a monumental sculpture in marble now in the Vatican Museums, Rome. The statue is attributed by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus...
is, in such a manner that it would be the first object that one sees on entering". It was completed in 1806 and transported to the Musee Napoleon, but when Napoleon saw it there in April 1811 he refused to accept it, calling it "too athletic" and banning the public from seeing it. By that point his iconography tended more towards that of hard-working law-giver (as in David's 1812
Napoleon in his cabinet de travail) rather than semi-divine hero.
By 1814 the sculpture was in the Salle des Hommes Illustres, hidden behind a canvas screen, where it was probably first seen by Wellington. In the era after the
battle of WaterlooIn the Battle of Waterloo forces of the French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte and Michel Ney were defeated by those of the Seventh Coalition, including an Anglo-Allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington and a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blücher...
Canova supported the return of looted sculptures from the Musee Napoleon to their original collections, and he was still regarded as the best living artist, with his works in great demand from English patrons in particular. The Musee Napoleon reverted to being the Louvre and its looted sculptures such as the
Apollo BelvedereThe Apollo Belvedere or Apollo of the Belvedere — also called the Pythian Apollo — is a celebrated marble sculpture from Classical Antiquity. It was rediscovered in the late 15th century, during the Renaissance...
were returned to their original collections, with the removal of the
Napoleon was also mooted and Canova offering to re-purchase it. It was sold to the British government in 1816 for 66,000 Francs (then under £3,000), which the Louvre spent on re-installing its Salle des Antiques. Works by Canova were already being collected by the Duke, and the
Prince RegentGeorge IV was the king of Hanover and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...
presented it to him later that year. It was moved to Apsley House in 1817, where it is still on display.
There is a bronze copy at the Accademia di Brera in Milan made in 1811.
External links
- 'How Canova and Wellington honoured Napoleon', by Julius Bryant, Apollo, October 2005
- Christopher M. S. Johns, 'Portrait Mythology: Antonio Canova's Portraits of the Bonapartes', Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 115-129 (available on JSTOR)