The Oath of the Saxons to Napoleon

The address this canvas was ordered for was Versailles.

After the French beat the Prussians and their Saxon allies at Jena on the 14th of October 1806, Saxony changed sides, and Napoleon's administration wanted the moment on canvas. Benvenuti travelled to Paris, took the commission on the emperor's own order, and set the scene at night in the courtyard of the university at Jena, with Napoleon among his marshals, Murat and Bessieres among them. He signed it in the lower right corner: made in Florence, in 1812. It was shown in the Academy's gallery here before it went to France.

Then the empire fell, and the man Tuscany sent to Paris to argue for the return of the works the French had requisitioned was Benvenuti himself. He came home with his own painting. He sold it to Count Pietro Mozzi del Garbo, it passed through private hands for most of a century, and the state bought it for the nation in 1914 from the heirs of a German princess.