The portraits of Napoleon

School of François Gérard, Portrait of Napoleon. Ajaccio, Musée Fesch

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Among the members of the Bonaparte family, Napoleon is naturally the one who was portrayed by artists the most times, in the most versions and in the most copies. A shower of likenesses rained down from every corner of the Empire to fix, without a margin of error, the image of the sovereign.
The most famous portrait, the one perhaps most present in the collective imagination in part because copied so many times, is the one that portrays Napoleon in the clothing worn on the day of his Coronation as Emperor, 2 December 1804 in the church of Notre–Dame in Paris. For that occasion, Napoleon wore a long white silk tunic with gold fringe and a crimson and ermine mantel, as so was he represented, standing before his throne and with a gilded laurel crown on his head, by François Pascal Simon Baron Gérard, the official portraitist of the imperial family. Many copies of this work were made in Gerard’s atelier: in Ajaccio we find one exemplar at the Musée Fesch and another in the Salon Napoléonien of the Hôtel de Ville.
The emperor was instead depicted in a half–length pose in the painting at the Maison Bonaparte in Ajaccio made by Anne Louis Girodet de Roussy–Trioson, a painter and student of David. This painting shows its subject in a colder, less triumphant version, but no less bombastic and powerful.
The portrait of the Emperor Napoleon at the Palazzo Comunale of Portoferraio by Carlo Morelli is also in the half–length format. This canvas was given to the municipality of Portoferraio by Prince Anatole Demidoff in 1853, together with another, depicting Our Lady of the Assumption. This gift was part of a campaign promoting his presence in the area, tied to his purchase of the Napoleonic estate of San Martino and the founding of the Gallery. From the inventory of the Napoleon Museum published in 1860 we learn that Anatole owned the original by Gerard, made in 1804: it is not to be excluded therefore that the copyist commissioned to produce the work for the municipality of Portoferraio was Carlo Morelli, a Roman painter among the few Italian artists appreciated by the prince.
Another portrait of Napoleon, when already emperor but here portrayed in military clothing, is kept at the Maison Bonaparte in Ajaccio: this painting, simply made, is far removed from the official representations, presenting Bonaparte with less propagandistic rhetoric.

There are also many sculpted portraits, in the Neoclassical half–length format. In 1798, Antoine–Denis Chaudet made the bust that would become the official sculpted likeness of Napoleon, circulated in many exemplars in bronze and in marble and winning respect in the version by Canova (a copy of which by Bartolini is kept in the Maison Bonaparte in Ajaccio): Napoleon is here portrayed with almost Augustan features, referencing the desired parallel to the ancient Roman emperors without lacking precise notation of the physiognomic characteristics of Bonaparte. A marble exemplar of this bust is kept in the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio and another in the Salon Napoléonien in the Hôtel de Ville.
In Ajaccio there are also two versions of busts portraying Napoleon prior to his rise to the imperial throne. The first, in the Maison Bonaparte, is a copy of the Bust of General Bonaparte made by Charles–Louis Corbet by 1798 and portraying the champion of the Italian Campaign. The other, at the Maison Bonaparte, is a bronze copy of Napoleon as First Consul by Louis–Simon Boizot, the plaster model for which is kept in the Museum of Sèvres.