Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Part I: Introduction

Prologue: A King Listens

Italo Calvino

1. Staging an Empire

Susan L. Siegfried

Part II: Ingres’s Portrait of Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne

Susan L. Siegfried

2. The Painting

3. Patronage

4. The Critics

Part III: David’s Sacre

Todd Porterfield

5. Patterns of Reception

6. Fabulous Retroactivity

7. Makeup and Shopping

Part IV: Epilogue

Todd Porterfield

8. Epilogue

Appendixes

A. “Interior. Paris, 11 frimaire,” Gazette nationale ou Le Moniteur universel, No. 72, Monday, 12 frimaire an 13 de la République [December 3, 1804]

B. “Variety,” Gazette nationale ou Le Moniteur universel, No. 76, Friday, 16 frimaire an 13 de la République [December 7, 1804]

C. “Interior. Paris, January 15,” Gazette nationale ou Le Moniteur universel, No. 16, Saturday, January 16, 1808

D. Arlequin at the Museum, or a vaudeville critique of the paintings exhibited at the Salon. Twelfth year, no. 2 (Paris: Brasseur aîné, 1808): 3–8.

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Photograph Credits

About the Author

Todd Porterfield is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Art History at the Universite de Montreal. He is the author of The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism (1998). Susan L. Siegfried is Professor of Art History and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Her publications include Fingering Ingres (2001), with Adrian Rifkin; The Art of Louis-Leopold Boilly (1995); and, with Marjorie Cohn, Works by J.A.D. Ingres in the Collection of the Fogg Art Museum (1980).

Reviews

“Some of the best art history I’ve read in a long time.”—Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University

“Both authors are wonderful writers, offering clear, forceful prose that will be as accessible to undergraduates as it is informative and inspiring to specialists in the field. Staging Empire is, in short, a marvelously illuminating and captivating study, one that represents the discipline of art history and cultural criticism in general at their highest levels of sophistication.”—Andrew Carrington Shelton, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

“As a whole, this is a comprehensive and thought-provoking new approach to two well-known images of Napoleon that calls attention to the challenges that the modern ruler’s representation poses.”—Mechthild Fend, Art Bulletin

“Porterfield provides a compelling and lucid account of the Sacre and its contingent rhetoric; this also stands as a complement to the exhibition on and literally adjacent to the Sacre in the gallery it inhabits which was held in the Louvre, in a structure which was something between a visitor centre and a shrine for the faithful. Porterfield also succeeds in making his account suggestively outward-facing in the sense that it engages with wider issues of imperialism and representation.”—Richard Wrigley, Oxford Art Journal