Thomas Crow, Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812-1820. Princeton, NJand Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Bollingen Series XXXV: Vol. 64.
Review by Andrei Pop, University of Chicago
"Art historians have not been quite as hard on Napoleon, but he has given them enough trouble. For he mobilized the arts, above all portraits of his person, in ways consistent with imperial precedent but outstripping in ambition any ruler of his era. In concert with this personal propaganda, he seized for the Musée Napoleon many of Rome’s antiquities, a practice reversed after his fall but emulated by colonial powers ever since. Napoleon’s legacy in the arts was mixed in more ways than one: his instrumentalization of French academic art deprived it of whatever intellectual and aesthetic legitimacy it retained at the end of the French Revolution. If the Empire remains a force in fashion and furniture, its identity in painting and sculpture is less distinct: historians have focused on art administration, or single artists, from Jacques-Louis David and his pupils to Jean-Dominique Ingres and Théodore Géricault, who navigated the choppy waters.[2] It is as if the towering figure of Napoleon cannot be perceived directly in the art he so forcefully claimed as his own...."