UC San Diego

Anne Louis Girodet showed his portrait of Belley at the Salon of 1798 during the height of the Directory government. Belley represented a history of where France had been and where it was at the time. When we look upon Girodet's painting we are compelled to reflect upon the sacrifices of three revolutions as well as the slave trade itself. Girodet absorbs and re-articulates an entire epistemology of the black figure in anglo as well as French painting. Belley accounts for a great deal of aesthetic shifts in fashion as well English effects on French artistic practices. Girodet presents not only a challenge to history painting but academic practices with regards to the body. What we see in Belley is a new France where a black man, former slave, can rise to be a French aristocrat. At the same time that Belley was being painted a young military officer from Corsica was starting to make a name for himself in France. Napoleon Bonaparte would have a meteoric rise to height that no one in the modern world has since surpassed. Ever present in his mind and manner, though, were his roots on the tiny island possession that had been conquered by France just before his birth. Through painting and controlled artistic propaganda we see Napoleon emerge as a figure who articulates the northern and southern extremes of his empire in addition to the historical lineage he attempts to lay claim to. Ingres' 1806 of Napoleon Enthroned, later to be re-imagined by Andrea Appiani, is the concluding presentation of a body that has left the Mediterranean world and scaled the heights of Valhalla as well as absorbed the presentation of the ancient caesars. Like Belley, Napoleon is born into colonialism. Both men, however, break their chains. Each is ascendent and in representation shows a worldliness that few at the time possessed. Belley was capable of moving beyond the Atlantic and the West Indies to become a cosmopolitain man. So too was Napoleon a man of the world, however, in his case, it was a world which he controlled