Napoleon, David: The Image Enthroned (2005)
Written and directed by Patric Jean.
Distributed by First Run / Icarus Films,
51 minutes.
On December 2, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte endeavored to legitimate his claim to absolute power by stage-managing a magnificent pageant in Notre Dame Cathedral that transmogrified ancient myths, church rituals, and symbols of empire and monarchy. The five-hour ceremony, a disjointed pairing of a secular coronation with a pre-Revolutionary papal anointment, culminated in an act of audacious ritual usurpation: at the moment of consecration, Napoleon trampled papal sanctity and crowned himself Emperor, publicly humiliating Pope Pius VII, whose authority--toppled by the Revolution--Bonaparte had restored specifically for this unprecedented royal anointment.
However, as Patric Jean reveals in Napoleon, David: the Image Enthroned (2005), this “surprise” denouement had been prearranged, capping four months of bitter papal negotiations. In return for an opportunity to proselytize in France, the Pope agreed to journey to Paris to play a supplicant role in a public spectacle that placed the Vatican beneath the Emperor of the French People.
Looking down from a lavishly draped spectator’s box, Jacques-Louis David, the premiere neo-classical painter of the age, sketched this epochal moment and filled his notebooks with impressions of the royal entourage. David set up his studio in the chapel, and guided by mock-ups and clay figurines, completed Napoleon’s Coronation in two years. Upon inspecting the finished work--one of four that Napoleon had commissioned to commemorate his ascendancy--the Emperor exclaimed, “It is not a painting. There are people walking in this picture. Life is everywhere. David, I salute you. You have made me a French knight.”
Resplendent with 150 life-sized figures, this enormous canvas (some 660 square feet), which now hangs in the Louvre, is the organizing motif of Napoleon, David. The Coronation painting is on screen for nearly 15 minutes of Jean’s 51-minute film about the ritual machinations of power and image. Jean explores the painting’s terrain inch by inch--close enough to reveal canvas dimples beneath the paint. As the camera drinks in characters, colors, and gestures from multiple angles, Jean exposes the Coronation’s distortions of fact, both delicate and gross.
Originally, David had painted Napoleon crowning himself with a golden laurel wreath. However, to render the Emperor more chivalrous, David recast him crowning a kneeling Josephine. A close-up reveals the after-image of the original composition, a ghostly crown floating above an unsuspecting churchman. David gave 41-year-old Josephine a maiden’s rosy, unlined face. Napoleon’s mother, who loathed Josephine, snubbed the event, remaining in Rome. On Napoleon’s orders, David conspicuously placed her in the main tribune. David had painted a passive Pope, hands in his lap. This displeased Napoleon: “I didn’t have him travel this far to sit idly.” Hence, for posterity, the pontiff is blessing the moment.
Napoleon, David portrays the Emperor as a consummate propagandist who understood the primacy of image in sustaining power. In the 1799 Syrian campaign, Napoleon deserted the sick and wounded and ultimately lost half his army. To squelch rumors, Josephine commissioned Antoine-Jean Gros to reframe history. Thus, in Napoleon at the Penthouse at Jaffa (1804), impervious to infection, like some god, the benevolent leader comforts bubonic plague victims.
In David, Napoleon found the perfect image maker, a republican whose allegorical paintings--such as The Oath of the Horatii (1784), commissioned by Louis XVI--inculcated Roman virtue. In Napoleon, David found the ideal subject, a conqueror with the perfect visage and an imperious flair for grandiosity. “What a fine face he has,” David said during a sitting in 1798. “It is pure. It is grand. Like antiquity.”
Napoleon sought to dissemble naked power in reverence for the past. Thus, his Coronation featured a pastiche of ritual objects and costumes, some invented--such as the ersatz crown of Charlemagne. Napoleon’s white silk tunic, embroidered with bees, a symbol of empire, a hive with one leader, was genuinely emblematic of Charlemagne. The red velvet robes, the yards and yards of ermine and gold trim, recalled the Bourbon dynasty. In scrutinizing the dominant ritual symbols in isolation--Charlemagne’s scepter, the sword of Louis XVI--the camera seems to invoke their totemic power.
Jean is at his best during such moments, when he subjects artifacts to a detailed appreciation of their craftsmanship and ritual significance. The exposition of content finds its ideal medium when the camera extends acuity and understanding, as when a gray, skeletal Josephine in David’s sketch book dissolves and blooms into red and gold, a finished figure on the grand tableau. When the narrator terms most of the faces in Napoleon’sCoronation “expressionless,” a slow, halting pan renders the assertion myopic.
Jean’s least compelling footage is a clumsy bit of agit-prop staged in the Louvre. To illustrate Napoleon’s reinstitution of slavery, the camera frames a period drawing of manacled blacks in the tropics. Cut to Cour Marly, an expansive sculpture gallery where a black janitor is cleaning a marble staircase. The camera recedes to show an actor dressed as Napoleon crossing the chamber, the crisp echo of heel on stone. The juxtaposition of oppressor and oppressed?
But this is a small transgression, easily forgiven. For Napoleon, David is even-handed in its reminder that spectacle diverts the eye from oppression. The Louvre also houses the Code of Hammurabi, a conical, black basalt stele, seven feet in height. Above the compendium of rules, a ritual scene legitimates Hammurabi’s authority as law giver, as ruler. Before the sun god Shamash, stands a reverent Hammurabi, his arms folded in prayer, as Shamash invests him with the symbols of royal authority, a scepter and ring. Napoleon, David reveals that underneath all the pomp and finery lies a ruse as old as Babylon.
Tony Osborne
GonzagaUniversity