In September 1804 Napoleon commissioned Jacques-Louis David with a monumental painting to commemorate his coronation ceremony. David, known for his Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), dedicated a little over a year to the emperor’s commission. The scene of the coronation, which took place in Notre Dame, is quite unique: not only is the decoration archaic, but in the best style of a Roman imperator Napoleon wears a laurel wreath, ancient symbol of victory. But the most intriguing detail is that the new emperor, with a small crown held up high, turns his back on Pope Pius VII, who silently oversees the ceremony. Napoleon has crowned himself and now proceeds to crown Josephine as empress. With his back to the Pope, David’s painting depicts the first modern dictator in an attitude opposite to that of Tukulti-Ninurta’s engraving: instead of grovelling before the empty throne of his god, Napoleon turns his back on his representative on earth (1.5). The sovereign is now free to act as he pleases, neither god nor the church have put the crown on his head. Both the vertical ascent-descent axis (1.15) and the horizontal, let’s call it, submissive-dominant axis, have been altered.
Jacques-Louis David, Coronation of Napoleon (1807)
Dominique Ingres, disciple of David, also commemorated the occasion with a non-commissioned painting that shows Napoleon sitting on his imperial throne. Hardly criticized at the time, the painting resorts to a hieratism and symbolism that present him as an almost supernatural being. With his right hand he is holding the scepter of Charles V of France while Charlemagne’s Main de Justice rests on his left knee. The imperial eagle can be made out on the step that leads to the throne, just below the cushion on which his feet rest. In the back rest we see a semicircle with seven stars presided in the zenith by a flower that resembles a sun. An extremely dignified scenario for an imposing little man who forcibly recruited millions, sent hundreds of thousands of young people to their deaths, and very nearly ruined the naval and the whole of French trade. All, says Chateaubriand, “for an abominable tyrant … for a foreigner who is so prodigal of the french blood, merely because he has not a drop of that blood in his veins.”1 The Vicomte de Chateaubriand was, of course, a royalist.
Ingres, Napoléon I sur le trône impérial (1806)
Ingres’ depiction of Napoleon recalls a later picture by the same artist entitled Jupiter and Thetis (1811) in which the mother of Achilles begs Zeus to allow the Trojans to drive away the Greeks.
She sat down before the son of Saturn, clasped his knees with her left arm, and lifted up her right in supplication to the sovereign one.2
Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis (1811)
The Nereid is prostrate before Zeus Pater while he, of imposing leonine features—the solar animal par excellence—sits on his golden throne. Their proportions are, fittingly, those of an adult and a girl. Infantilization, as we will see later on, is one of the main features of the terrible place. The right hand of Zeus holds a scepter and the left rests comfortably in a cloud. His eagle is standing to the left of the throne looking intently at Thetis. Seven lines radiate from the head of the god, as if dividing the orb in the seven celestial spheres (1.8).
The paintings of David and Ingres act as pictorial representations of the juridical theatre where sovereignty takes place (0.13). In their role of scenarios, these paintings reveal the sovereign as a mask (persona) that evokes the symbols of majesty and excellence of the emperors and gods of old (1.10). Hidden behind this mask the king becomes an integral part of the theatre of sovereignty, in fact, its gravitational center.
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