Napoleon I. auf dem Kaiserthron

Napoleon had crowned himself emperor only two years before Ingres painted this in 1806, and the young painter reached back past every recent king to make him look eternal. He seated Napoleon frontal and rigid, sceptre in each hand, in the exact pose old ivories gave to God the Father and to Zeus enthroned. The detail is almost hallucinatory, every jewel and thread of the ermine picked out cold and hard. When it went up at the Salon that year the critics disliked it, complaining that the flat colour and frozen precision felt archaic and airless, more medieval icon than living man. Look down at the carpet and you find an eagle circled by the signs of the zodiac, tying the emperor to Jupiter. The picture stayed with the legislature and hangs now in the army museum at the Invalides in Paris, where Napoleon himself is buried.