Treasures of the Louvre Page #6

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Emperor explained that he hadn't got

the Pontiff all the way from the

Vatican just to sit and do nothing.

So, David changed this to Pope

Pius VII blessing the coronation.

And there's mischief here too.

Look at the wily survivor

Talleyrand and his turned up nose.

This is the man that

Bonaparte famously called,

"a piece of sh*t

in a silk stocking."

The female figure on the balcony,

that's Napoleon's mother,

who couldn't stand Josephine

and actually wasn't

there on the big day.

But on instruction,

David put her in the picture anyway.

And there, of course, sketchbook in

hand, is the great artist himself.

Despite the success

of this painting,

there was a prickly

relationship between David

and the courtiers

around the Emperor.

This picture was meant to be

the first of four

celebrating the coronation,

but the project was never completed

after squabbles about money.

So it's perhaps no coincidence

that in 1806, the great general

gave David and fellow painters

their marching orders.

They had just 24 hours

to pack up their studios in

the Cour Carree and get out.

And when Napoleon married

for the second time in 1810,

David wasn't asked

to record the ceremony

when it took place in the Louvre.

The close relationship between

painter and despot was over

as their fortunes declined,

David to new rivals

with new ideas about art,

Napoleon to the hubris that

led to his fall from power

and the return of

the Bourbon monarchy.

The rule of Napoleon was ended in

1815 with the Battle of Waterloo,

and the Restoration of the

Bourbon dynasty was secured.

The Louvre was renamed

Le Musee Royal,

and all of the visual

propaganda changed too.

Out went the Napoleonic N

and the bees and the eagles

that had been his symbol,

and in came the image of the lily

and the monogram LL for Louis XVIII,

and there was other

interesting stuff.

If you look up here, you can see

that this is the face of Napoleon.

What happened was that the new King

had a wig placed

on Bonaparte's head,

transforming him into the image of

his illustrious forebear, Louis XIV.

The Restoration was a challenging

period for the Louvre, forced

to concede to demands that 5,000

pieces of plundered art be returned.

The bronze horses on top of the

Arc de Triomphe went back to Venice,

and were replaced by

these grey imitations.

Some treasures did remain.

The Wedding at Cana was kept,

simply too big to be moved again,

the museum argued.

An elderly David was now in exile

like his former patron Bonaparte,

but a new generation

of painters was emerging

and producing

stunning works of art.

One is to be found

in the Salle Rouge.

This painting, Le Radeau de la

Meduse, The Raft of the Medusa

by Gericault, is one of the

great treasures of the Louvre.

It was the talk of the Salon when

it was first exhibited in 1819,

and it was very quickly acquired

by the then-director of the Louvre,

the Compte de Forbin. I think it's

an extraordinary, complex painting.

It's realistic but

it's not quite real,

you've got these human bodies

constructed as a kind of pyramid.

It's very romantic,

it's about human suffering

but also about

the impossibility of hope.

But what you really feel

is that you're in the painting,

you're in that pyramid

of human suffering.

And you can see the kind of

forensic nature of Gericault's work.

He was the kind of man who

spent hours in mortuaries

and hospitals

sketching out dead bodies

and he wasn't even afraid to take

home the limbs to work out the

tricky bits, and that's what makes

this painting so stark, so powerful.

There was no bigger scandal

than the shipwreck of the frigate

Meduse off the West African coast,

captained by the hapless

Viscount Chaumareys.

Of the 147 crew, only 13 survived.

This was headline news,

and the public lapped up lurid

tales of cannibalism and madness.

Such a juicy story translated

to canvas could only be

good for the career

of the 20-year-old artist.

I asked curator Sebastien Allard

about the painting.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

TRANSLATOR:
'It was, and has been

taken as a form of allegory,

'since Gericault's depicting

a ship that was wrecked

'as a direct result of the

incompetence of its captain.

'Survivors were stranded on a raft

without food, water or hope,

'and people took all this as an

allusion to the French State

'after the fall of the Empire,

governed by incompetence.'

There are more intense, romantic

sensibilities at work here.

TRANSLATOR:
'We can see here a taste

for rather dark and sinister painting

'that's in stark contrast to the

relatively clear and bright paintings

'of David, and which, of course,

'acts as a tool towards the

dramatic effect of the painting.

'And it's a rather macabre style,

'with a penchant

for death and corpses.'

As well as bringing the best of

contemporary art into the Louvre,

these decades of the Restoration

saw the arrival from Egypt

of mysterious and magical objects

that were old yet very new.

On the 25th of October 1836,

the great obelisk

behind me here was unveiled.

It came from a temple in Luxor

and was the gift

of the Khedive of Egypt.

Its original base featured monkeys

who had suspiciously

large erections,

and obviously this had to be

replaced by something

much more austere, in granite

and fashioned in Brittany.

But nonetheless, this latest

monument was a great success,

and the most important thing was

that it announced a new mania in

France for all things Oriental.

The man who arranged the passage

of the obelisk to Paris,

and who brought so much

to the story of the Louvre,

was Jean-Francois Champollion.

Now Champollion worked here

in the Louvre, and he established

the superb and stunning

collection that we see here today.

But not only that, Champollion

was the first person to decipher

hieroglyphics, and in doing so, he

invented the science of Egyptology.

Inspired by Napoleon's

Egyptian Campaigns,

Champollion devoted his life to

understanding this ancient culture.

By the age of 16, he knew

a dozen ancient languages,

and with this

extraordinary facility,

he began the long task

of deciphering hieroglyphs.

In 1824, in the

Precis du systeme hieroglyphique,

Champollion revealed that he had

cracked these hidden codes.

By this time, Champollion had

persuaded the King to buy three

private collections for the Louvre,

and these were housed in

a dedicated Musee Egyptien.

When it opened, Champollion wrote

an open letter to visitors saying,

"I'm thrilled just thinking

about what I have to show you."

And he was dead right

to be thrilled.

Along with statues

of Egyptian pharaohs,

there were religious artefacts

and everyday objects.

Today, we take these for granted,

but in 1826, this was

the shock of the new.

We should pause to reflect

on this moment in our story,

because it signals another

important transformation

for the Louvre.

Before, it was a

palace with paintings.

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