Once the god Aesculapius is ensconced in his temple on Tiber Island in the city of Rome, Ovid is ready to round off his Metamorphoses with salient points from the life of Julius Caesar, and links to the contemporary Emperor Augustus. These are politically charged topics, and merit inoffensive coverage and language. In his whirlwind summary of some of Julius Caesar’s achievements, Ovid is obliged to write that it was Augustus who was the greater, before tackling the thorny issue of Caesar’s assassination.

When swords were taken into the Senate House in preparation, Venus pleaded Caesar’s case, and Jupiter responded that the emperor’s life was already complete, and it was time for him to join the gods. Venus then descended quickly and rescued Caesar’s soul as he lay dying on the floor of the Senate. Julius Caesar therefore underwent transformation into a star (catasterisation) as his apotheosis, on his assassination.

Caesar’s assassins were senators of Rome, a group of more than thirty led by three conspirators including his former friend and ally Marcus Junius Brutus. Several of Caesar’s closest aides had warned him not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, and he had to be brought by one of the conspirators. As he arrived at the Senate, Caesar was presented with a petition, and the conspirators crowded around him.

Karl von Piloty’s The Murder of Caesar from 1865 shows this moment, with Julius Caesar sat on a throne in the portico of the Senate. Immediately behind him, one of the conspirators has raised his dagger above his head, ready to strike the first blow.

Casca, one of the conspirators, produced his dagger and struck the dictator a glancing wound in his neck. The whole group closed in and stabbed Caesar repeatedly.

This is the stage shown by Vincenzo Camuccini in The Assassination of Julius Caesar from 1804-05, although this isn’t taking place on the steps in the portico, and Caesar has already moved forward from his seat.

Blinded by his blood, Caesar then tripped over and fell, and was stabbed further on the lower steps of the portico of the Senate. The conspirators made off, leaving Caesar dead where he lay, with around twenty-three knife wounds.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor, as his assassins make their way out of the Senate, brandishing their daggers above their heads.

None of those paintings shows the goddess Venus or Caesar’s apotheosis.

It’s Virgil Solis’s engraving of The Deification of Julius Caesar (before 1562) that shows simultaneously the assassination of the dictator at the left, and Venus taking him up to the gods, above, where Jupiter is addressing the other gods (upper right).

Shakespeare’s play develops subsequent events in more detail, and contains two most memorable lines: Et tu Brutus? (“you too, Brutus?”), said when Brutus stabs Caesar, and Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears as the opening words of Brutus’ oration over Caesar’s corpse.

Later, as Brutus and Cassius prepare to wage war against a triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius (later granted the honorific name Augustus) and Lepidus, Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus to warn of his imminent defeat.

This engraving of Richard Westall’s painting Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar, from about 1802, shows Brutus in his role of general, sat at a writing desk, as Caesar’s ghost fills the upper left of the painting, warning Brutus of his imminent death with the portentous words Thou shalt see me at Philippi.

William Blake painted a similar scene in his Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost from 1806, for an illustrated folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. This series of illustrations for this play are not well-known among Blake’s work, and were made early in his career.

Edwin Austin Abbey, in his painting Within the Tent of Brutus: Enter the Ghost of Caesar from 1905, spatters the white robe of the ghost with the blood from multiple stab wounds.

With Julius Caesar dead, it’s time for Ovid to draw his Metamorphoses to a close by praising the Emperor Augustus.

By the 1880s, some established painters had begun to use photographs in the development of their paintings, although they appear to have kept quiet about those techniques. During the next decade this became more widespread, and raised the question of whether photography should be accepted as a new art.

In the 1890s Edgar Degas experimented with photography. This is an albumen print of patron and amateur painter Henry Lerolle with two of his daughters, Yvonne and Christine, taken by Degas in 1895-96.

Degas also took this self-portrait with Christine and Yvonne Lerolle in the same period.

In Degas’ oil painting of After the Bath from about 1895, the woman has adopted a strange and unnatural position, as if she has almost fallen from the edge of the deep bath. Her left foot is still cocked over its edge, as the rest of her lies on her right side on a towel. A maid stands behind her, attending to her long hair.

Degas didn’t just draw and paint women bathing, but made photos as well, such as this print of After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back from 1896.

The realist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme not only experimented with photography for many years, but was an enthusiastic advocate for its recognition as an art in its own right.

Gérôme’s Truth Coming out of her Well to Shame Mankind (1896) is based on a quotation attributed to Democritus, “Of a truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well” (or, more literally, ‘in an abyss’). Gérôme used the same allusion in his preface to Émile Bayard’s posthumous collection of collotype plates of photographs of nudes, Le Nu esthétique. L’Homme, la Femme, L’Enfant. Album de documents artistiques inédits d’après Nature, published in 1902, where he wrote:
Photography is an art. It forces artists to discard their old routine and forget their old formulas. It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen; a great and inexpressible service for Art. It is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back.

It’s almost certain that Jules-Alexis Muenier became a photographer between 1880, when he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, and when he travelled to North Africa with Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret in 1888, armed with cameras. Although he may have found it difficult to set up the necessary darkroom and processing laboratory when he was still living in Paris, in 1885 he moved to a large house on his parents-in-law’s estate in Coulevon, which should have been ideal.

Although I have been unable to find a suitable image of the painting, this photograph shows Muenier with his painting of The Harpsichord Lesson in about 1911, which became his most famous painting during his lifetime. Muenier, Gérôme and Dagnan-Bouveret weren’t just happy snapper photographers, but believed in photography as fine art. All three were early members of local photographic clubs, and Muenier and Dagnan-Bouveret exhibited their photographs as seriously as their paintings.

Franz von Stuck’s remarkable Dancers (1896) is one of his earlier paintings exploring images of dancing women. This seems to have been inspired by some of the more flamboyant dresses of the day, and as an experiment in the portrayal of motion, in turn influenced by contemporary photography.

Joaquín Sorolla’s portrait of The Photographer Christian Franzen from 1903 brings this full circle. Franzen (1864-1923) was Danish by birth, trained in Copenhagen, then worked throughout Europe until he established his studio in Madrid in 1896. He was appointed court photographer to King Alfonso XIII.

By the twentieth century, some of the most prolific and painterly painters were also dedicated photographers.

Marthe in the Bathtub (1907) is one of the thousands of photos of Marthe taken by Pierre Bonnard.

Kneeling Woman or Nude with Tub from 1913 is a painting that surely reflects Bonnard’s photographs.

I Werners Eka (In Werner’s Rowing Boat) from 1917 is one of Anders Zorn’s last great paintings of a nude outdoors.

Zorn had also been an enthusiastic photographer who used photos for his paintings. This undated print was taken At Lake Siljan, close to his home town of Mora.

To finish, I leap forward a century to the painstakingly real paintings of Ellen Altfest. To ensure her painted representations are exact, she measures angles with metal skewers, and places marks to maintain her orientation in forests of hair. She eschews grids and projections so she can retain a sense of herself, and not lapse into mechanical reproduction. She only paints in natural light, and often outdoors.

The end result is nothing like a photograph. Her oil paintings result from the most prolonged and intense looking, and slow, meticulous painting. I feel sure that Gérôme would have loved them.

Telling a story, narrative, in a painting is one of its most common purposes, and greatest challenges. A landscape painting shows a view at a moment in time, but doesn’t normally tell a story, as that requires a minimum of two states, with the story linking them. So, although we might speculate what’s going in that countryside, without an indication of what went before, or what happened afterwards, there’s no story there.

Over the centuries, even millennia, since humans have been painting, several techniques have developed for telling a story with more than one timepoint shown in paintings. Although the terms used have varied, in general those fall into the following categories:

• instantaneous, where the image is intended to show what was happening at a single moment in time, even though it’s likely to contain references to other moments in time;
• multi-image, where a series of separate images (paintings) is used to tell the story;
• multiplex, where a single image contains representations of two or more moments in time from a story;
• multi-frame, where two or more picture frames are used to tell a story, as in comics or manga;
• polymythic, where a single image contains two or more distinct stories.

In this article and tomorrow’s sequel, I show examples of each of these.

Instantaneous

Nicolas Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida from about 1630 draws its narrative from one of his favourite literary works, a then-popular epic poem by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) titled Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), and published in 1581. I have written a series of fourteen articles showing paintings and telling its story, which start here. This particular episode is detailed here.

The sleeping knight is Rinaldo, the greatest of the Christian knights engaged in Tasso’s romanticised and largely fictional account of the First Crusade, who has stopped to rest near the ‘ford of the Orontes’. On hearing a woman singing, he goes to the river, where he catches sight of Armida swimming naked.

Armida, though, had an evil aim, in that she had been secretly following Rinaldo, intending to murder him with her dagger. As the ‘Saracen’ witch who is trying to destroy the crusaders’ campaign, she had singled out its greatest knight for this fate. Having revealed herself to him, she sings and lulls him into an enchanted sleep so that she can thrust her dagger home.

Just as she is about to do this, she falls in love with him instead, and that’s the instant, the twist or peripeteia (to use Aristotle’s term), shown here. A winged amorino, lacking the bow and arrows of a true Cupid, restrains her right arm bearing her weapon. Her facial expression and left hand reveal her new intent to enchant and abduct him in her chariot, so he can become infatuated with her, and forget the Crusade altogether.

This is a single moment in time, in which Poussin has ingeniously incorporated references to the past and future. Provided that you’re familiar with Tasso’s story, it’s a superb example of instantaneous narrative, as practised throughout the history of painting across all continents and cultures.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Cleopatra before Caesar (1866) also depicts a single instant, but again has references to prior events, particularly the screwed up carpet, used by Cleopatra to gain entry. Her dreamy look towards Caesar also anticipates her affair with him. It therefore has instantaneous narrative.

Sometimes paintings with instantaneous narrative can make quite small and subtle references to other events in the story, and confirm their narrative nature. In Edward Burne-Jones’s Cinderella (1863) the only such reference is the missing slipper on Cinderella’s right foot.

Although Édouard Detaille’s Le Rêve (The Dream) (1888) contains two images, these aren’t in fact linked by normal narrative, but the dream image shown in the clouds could be considered as a form of analepsis, or flashback, making it instantaneous narrative.

Multi-image

I’ll be brief with these, as I have covered more examples here and here.

In 1856, Arthur Hughes told the story of The Eve of St Agnes in this triptych, read from left to right. At the left Porphyro is approaching the castle. In the centre he has woken Madeline, who hasn’t yet taken him into her bed. At the right the couple make their escape over drunken revellers.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s triptych showing the Aino Myth (1891) contains three separate images telling one of the stories from the Kalevala myths. It is therefore multi-image narrative, within which each image is itself conventional instantaneous narrative.

Multi-frame

Multi-frame paintings are by no means uncommon, but most usually adopt rectangular or square form. Indeed many of the more spectacular frescoes are in effect multi-framed, where there are several images on a single continuous surface. This is similar to the more recent development of comics/BD/graphic novels.

Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Stories of The Life and Passion of Christ (1513) arranges twenty frames covering the life of Christ around a central frame with four times the area of the others, showing the Crucifixion. The frames are naturally (for the European) read from left to right, along the rows from top to bottom, although the Crucifixion is part of the bottom row. This is a layout which is commonly used throughout graphic novels too, of course, and is a superb example of multi-frame narrative more than three centuries before Rodolphe Töpffer started experimenting with comic form.

The four separate episodes forming Hans Sebald Beham’s Scenes from the Life of David (1534) are arranged in a square, so that each occupies a triangular frame, clearly separated from the others, and quite different from a normal linear layout. The snag with this is that the panel is really only suitable for viewing when laid flat on a table, otherwise only one of the frames is correctly orientated. Beham clearly liked the symmetry afforded by this layout, and enhanced it in his composition of the two frames shown here at the top and bottom.

Frans Francken the Younger’s The Crucifixion of Christ, with Scenes from the Life of Jesus (1600s) puts the Crucifixion scene at the centre of a rectangle, around which are twelve scenes from the life painted in either normal or brown grisaille. Unfortunately those peripheral scenes are difficult to differentiate from one another, thus to identify, but they appear to be read in a clockwise direction from the upper right, rather than linearly.

Polymythic

Although linked, and often told together, the stories of Echo and of Narcissus can be separated, and it’s therefore feasible to classify John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus (1903) as being unusual in showing polymythic narrative.

A few paintings appear even more complex: Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) may contain one narrative in the foreground, a second in the background, and a third in the painting of The Rape of Europa shown in the far background. This would make it polymythic narrative at the very least.

Stage plays have been the source for many paintings, from the development of the professional theatre across Europe in the mid-sixteenth century in what soon became known as the commedia dell’arte, also Italian comedy in English. Unlike the scripted plays of William Shakespeare, this comedy theatre relied on a mixture of improvisation, stereotype characters, and prepared jokes. It has long been popular in the Venice Carnival, and spread throughout much of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it peaked.

This weekend I look first at paintings of its main tradition, and tomorrow at its relative the Punch and Judy show.

One of the keys to the success of the Commedia is its use of costume to identify its best-known characters. This ensured audiences recognised the role of each actor as soon as they walked onto the stage, and proves ideal for paintings too. Among the best-known and most enduring are:

• Harlequin (Arlecchino), a servant wearing a colourful jacket and trousers,
• Pulcinella, a servant wearing a baggy white outfit,
• Pantalone, an older wealthy man wearing a dark cape and red trousers,
• Colombine (Colombina), a maidservant wearing either black and white, or similar colourful dress to Harlequin,
• Pierrot, a servant and sad clown, wearing a voluminous white costume with large buttons,
• Scaramouche (Scaramuccio), a freed servant and skilled swordsman,
• Brighella, an evil servant often paired with Harlequin, wearing a costume trimmed in green,
• The Doctor (Il Dottore), a pedant from Bologna who claims to know everything.

These became increasingly stereotypical over time.

Michelangelo Cerquozzi’s Rehearsal, or A Scene from the Commedia dell’Arte from 1630-40 is an early record, showing more traditional costumes. At the left is a small group containing Scaramouche, Harlequin and possibly Brighella, and at the right are the Doctor and Pierrot, perhaps.

Perhaps the greatest master to develop a particular affection for the Commedia was the French Rococo painter Antoine Watteau. He developed this by 1705, when he had been taken on as an assistant to Claude Gillot.

Watteau’s Foursome from about 1713 shows a Pierrot figure standing with his back to the viewer as he talks to two ladies in fashionable dress.

In his fête galante, Pleasures of Love from about 1718-19, Watteau brings together his novel sub-genre with a Pierrot figure playing a guitar to serenade the ladies in the foreground.

Watteau’s Italian Comedians from about 1720 shows five figures who have just finished performing in a park on the outskirts of Paris. Pierrot, in his baggy white suit, holds his hat ready for donations from the audience. Brighella wears a green-gold suit and cape, and Mezzetin plays his guitar while Harlequin peers over his shoulder. At the far right is Scaramouche, in a Spanish costume of black with a white ruff.

From the same time, and under the same title, Watteau’s stage scene of Italian Comedians puts Pierrot centre-stage, and marked the artist’s last performance of this theme.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Francisco Goya recorded this troupe of itinerant Strolling Players (1793) on the bank of the River Manzanares in Madrid, with a packed audience behind its stage. At the left is Harlequin in his distinctive dress, with a grubby Pierrot towards the centre.

Costumes from the Commedia also became popular wear for masked balls.

If the story behind Gérôme’s Duel After the Ball (1857) is to be believed, on leaving a masked (fancy dress) ball in the winter of 1856-7, an elected official and a former police commissioner fought a duel in a copse in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. One was dressed as Pierrot, the other as Harlequin. Pierrot was wounded as a result, and the incident became notorious because of the personalities involved, and their comic costumes.

Pierrot leans, as white as his costume, collapsed against one of his team, his face suggesting shock if not imminent death from a wound bleeding onto his chest. His limp right arm still bears his sword, which now drags on the ground. Two other friends are visibly distressed at his condition and trying to console him.

Harlequin, with his second, walks off into the distance at the right. His sword is abandoned on the snowy ground, near four feathers that have dropped from the American Indian headdress of his second. In the murky distance there is a hackney cab, ready to take the combatants away, and a couple walking along the edge of the copse.

Gérôme stages this theatrically, with the absurd grim humour of the participants’ costumes and the comedy of Pierrot and Harlequin.

Stereotypes from the Commedia continue to appear sporadically in more modern paintings, including those of Ukrainian artist Abraham Mintchine who migrated to Paris in 1925.

Mintchine’s Pierrot (1928) is rich in symbols. Against a hilly landscape background, a figure dressed as this character from the Commedia wears a winged cap suggestive of the god Mercury. Resting in front of him are three large seashells.

His undated Child with Harlequin shows a child holding a doll dressed in a Harlequin costume with a black mask.

Mintchine’s Self-Portrait as Harlequin is thought to have been painted shortly before his death in early 1931, and shows another variant of the costume, this time with an exuberant ruff and a starched white linen hat, similar to those worn by Breton women.

Further reading

Wikipedia
Judith Chaffee’s Commedia website

Neither Napoleon nor his wife Joséphine were faithful during their marriage, but she failed to produce the heir that the Emperor wanted. In 1809, he informed her that he had to find a wife who could provide an heir, and they divorced the following January. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon went on to paint her successor Marie-Louise of Austria as well.

Following his marriage to the eighteen year-old Marie-Louise of Austria, the new Empress became pregnant, and on 20 March 1811 gave birth to their son, who was soon made King of Rome. That year, Prud’hon painted this Portrait of the King of Rome, setting him asleep in a glade with a waterfall behind. Prud’hon was also involved in decorating a crib for the infant.

Meanwhile, the Emperor’s youngest sister Caroline had married one of Napoleon’s most brilliant cavalry officers who succeeded Joseph Bonaparte (the emperor’s older brother) as King of Naples. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, known best for her brilliant pastel paintings, used oils for this portrait of Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, with her Daughter Letizia in 1807.

Napoleon had continued leading French forces from his success at the Battle of Austerlitz in Austria in 1805, through Eastern Europe, then in Spain in 1808, where he installed his older brother Joseph as king. However, the French invasion of Russia in the summer of 1812 proved a disaster.

Ary Scheffer’s account of The Retreat of Napoleon’s Army from Russia in 1812 (1826) shows this march of death starting from Moscow in the middle of October 1812, which took until the middle of December to clear Russian territory. In the appalling winter weather, Napoleon’s Grande Armée is claimed to have shrunk from 100,000 to around 22,000.

The tide had turned. The following year Napoleon was decisively defeated at Leipzig, France was invaded, he was forced to abdicate in April 1814, and was exiled to the island of Elba, in the Mediterranean between Corsica and Tuscany. He escaped and returned to France, where he and his forces were defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. He was finally sent to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.

JMW Turner’s War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet from 1842 shows an imagined moment from Napoleon’s exile on the British island of Saint Helena, no doubt inspired by the return of the emperor’s ashes for state burial in France in 1840. In the background is one of the British sentries stationed on this remote island to guard the former emperor. Napoleon is bowing slightly to a tiny limpet on a rock, a symbol of the futility of war. The sunset behind forms the sea of blood resulting from Napoleon’s many battles across Europe.

Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815. He refused a blindfold, and was allowed to give the command to fire upon himself.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Death of Marshal Ney (1868) uses a similar narrative approach to Gérôme’s earlier paintings of the murder of Caesar, in showing a moment after the climax of the story. Ney’s body is abandoned, slumped and lifeless on the muddy ground, his top hat apart at the right edge of the canvas. Behind where he stood but a few moments ago there are half a dozen bullet impact marks on the wall, as the firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance.

For a few brief weeks after Napoleon’s abdication, he tried to make his son the King of Rome his successor, as Napoleon II.

His cousin Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had been born in the Tuileries Palace in Paris. After Napoleon I had been sent to Saint Helena, the rest of the emperor’s family were dispersed elsewhere. Louis Napoleon joined the Swiss Army, developed political aspirations, and in 1836 led an attempted coup from Strasbourg. After a period of exile in London, he attempted a second coup in 1840 that quickly turned into a fiasco. He escaped from prison in 1846, fled to London, only to return to Paris after the French Revolution of 1848. He then gained a place in the National Assembly, where he campaigned successfully for election as President of France. He staged a further coup in December 1851, and won a referendum enabling him to proclaim himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, on 2 December 1852.

Gérôme articulated Napoleon III’s aspirations for empire in his elaborate and formal painting of the Reception of Siamese Ambassadors by Napoleon III (1864), depicting a grand reception held at Fontainebleau on 27 June 1861. Gérôme had attended in the role of semi-official court painter (commissioned by the State), made sketches of some of the key figures, and was further aided by photographs made by Nadar. He also included himself, and the older artist Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891), in the painting: I believe that they are both at the back, at the far left.

Cabanel’s life-sized full-length portrait of the Emperor Napoleon III from about 1865 proved controversial, as many felt that his image of their emperor should have greater grandeur. Some critics even accused Cabanel of making him look like a hotel manager or waiter, and I can see their point. The Empress Eugénie and Napoleon’s family had no such qualms, though: Cabanel’s painting was hung in the Tuileries Palace, and when the Second Empire collapsed, and the empress fled to Britain, she took this painting with her into exile.

Napoleon III clearly lacked his uncle’s flair for military leadership, and declaration of war against Prussia on 19 July 1870 led to a series of disastrous defeats ending with the Battle of Sedan, a fortified French city in the Ardennes. The French Army surrendered to the Prussians and Napoleon III became a prisoner of war.

Emil Hünten’s undated Welcome of Empress Eugénie by Prussian Soldiers shows an event that never occurred. When the Empress was told of her husband’s surrender to the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan, she is reported to have said: “No! An Emperor does not capitulate! He is dead!… They are trying to hide it from me. Why didn’t he kill himself! Doesn’t he know he has dishonored himself?!” With hostile crowds forming outside her Tuileries Palace, she slipped out to find sanctuary in the company of her American dentist, then fled to England by yacht on 7 September 1870. She was later joined by the former emperor, and the couple lived at Chislehurst in Kent.

Perhaps the most lasting memorial to these French emperors is the Suez Canal. During Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798, he had engineers and others search for an ancient canal running north from the Red Sea. In 1804, the new Emperor considered constructing a canal to connect the south-eastern Mediterranean with the Red Sea. Early in the reign of Napoleon III, Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained a concession to construct the canal that Napoleon I had dreamed of. The Suez Canal was officially opened on 17 November 1869, with both the Empress Eugénie of France and the Crown Prince of Prussia present as guests.

Painted by the great marine artist Ivan Aivazovsky shortly after that official opening in 1869, Suez Canal shows a convoy of ships passing through in an unearthly light. Within a year the Second Empire had fallen, but Napoleon’s canal went on.

The most famous French person, born a Corsican of Italian origin, who died on the British South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, was the Emperor Napoleon I. His life, battles, wives and descendants have been painted repeatedly by some of the great artists of the nineteenth century, from Girodet to JMW Turner. This weekend I show a few of those images of greatness and downfall.

Napoleon Bonaparte rose rapidly through the French army following the French Revolution of 1789, until he became its commander for the campaign against Austria and Italy in 1796.

About a century later, Georges Clairin’s painting of Napoleon’s Troops in Front of San Marco, Venice provides a biased gloss on the fall of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. The French occupation around 4 June may itself have been relatively peaceful, but by the end of July had been declared a siege, with the arrest and imprisonment of many Venetians. Later in the year, the French plundered the city of many of its artworks, something that Clairin seems to have overlooked.

As a national hero, Napoleon and his army travelled on to invade Egypt and Syria in 1798.

In 1806, Napoleon commissioned Pierre-Narcisse Guérin to paint for the Gallery of Diana in the Tuileries Palace. The result was Napoleon Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels at Cairo, 23rd October 1798, completed in 1808.

Napoleon had taken the French army into Egypt in 1798, and conquered Alexandria and Cairo. On 21 October, the citizens of Cairo organised an uprising, and murdered the French commander and Napoleon’s aide-de-camp. The French fought back with artillery, then the cavalry fought their way back into the city, forcing the rebels out into the desert, or into the Great Mosque. Napoleon brought his artillery to bear on the mosque, following which his troops stormed the building, killing or wounding over five thousand. With control restored over Cairo, the leaders of the revolt were hunted down and executed. Following this, the city was taxed heavily in punishment, and put under military rule.

Guérin’s painting shows a very different event, in which Napoleon is engaged in open discourse with the rebels. However, the presence of French cavalry behind the Egyptians, and the action taking place at the far right, suggests the truth behind this ‘pardon’.

In 1810, Girodet painted the only reasonably accurate account of The Revolt of Cairo of 21 October 1798 and Napoleon’s massacre of the city’s residents. Most were killed when French cannons fired at the Al-Azhar Mosque where they were seeking refuge. This is a late oil sketch for the finished painting.

Léon Cogniet was also called to document Napoleon’s empire, painting his Bonaparte’s 1798 Egyptian Expedition (1835) on a ceiling in the Louvre Palace, as an explanation of how so many Egyptian artefacts came to be in Paris, ironically now on display in that same building.

Jean-Léon Gérôme made several paintings showing Napoleon in Egypt, including this highly detailed and intricate version of General Bonaparte and his Staff in Egypt from 1867.

In November 1799, Napoleon used these military victories to engineer a coup and became First Consul of the French Republic.

In early 1800, Napoleon made moves to reinforce French troops in Italy, so they could repossess territory lost to the Austrians in recent years. Leading his Reserve Army, he crossed the Alps via the Great St Bernard Pass in May, and his troops fought their first battle at Montebello on 9 June. Paul Delaroche was commissioned to paint a faithful account of this. His Napoleon Crossing the Alps from 1850 does at least sit the First Consul astride a mule, the only mount capable of carrying him in these conditions, but it’s still a good way from the truth. Napoleon’s face is bare, his left hand uncovered and resting on the pommel of his saddle, and he’s wearing a thin cloak and thin riding breeches.

In 1803, Napoleon sold the French territory of Louisiana to the United States, and at the end of the following year crowned himself Emperor of the French, giving him near-absolute power.

Among the paintings of François Flameng showing the Napoleonic period, one of the most striking is this scene of Napoleon Hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in which the pack is closing in on a cornered stag as the sun sets.

At about this time, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s paintings became appreciated by the emperor’s court, and Napoleon himself. He was thus commissioned to paint the Empress Joséphine. Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, as she was before marrying the Emperor in late 1804, must have been forty-one or forty-two years old at the time of Prud’hon’s commission, and a widow with two children. Most unconventionally, it must have been agreed that she wouldn’t be portrayed in her official role of Empress.

Prud’hon’s black chalk Study for a Portrait of Empress Joséphine, from 1805, perhaps shows the original concept of the Empress in her role as patron of the arts, complete with a lyre, reclining on the coast, against a background of trees.

His finished painting of The Empress Joséphine (c 1805) dispenses with the lyre and seats her on a stone bench in woodland, looking pensive if not slightly wistful.

But Joséphine failed to become pregnant by Napoleon, and four years later he informed her that he had to find a wife who could provide him with an heir.