Courtauld Institute of Art: Liberator, Despot, (fallen) Hero: Napoleon Bonaparte and the Visual Arts

Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1800, oil on canvas, Château de Malmaison.

2021 marks the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose immense legacy and problematic balance-sheet of achievements and atrocities continues to spark scholarly debate and divide opinion. This ten-week term of lectures focuses on the significant and varied impact of Napoleon’s reign on the visual arts. Lecturers will consider Napoleon’s employment of leading artists such as Jacques-Louis David, Antoine-Jean Gros, François Gérard, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in the production of an evolving range of mythologising and propagandistic images which fascinated contemporaries at home, and, in tandem with the widely disseminated idealising Empire style, influenced admirers and emulators abroad, Britain’s George IV among them. They will also consider imagery produced in response to the Napoleonic invasions outside of France, such as by Francisco de Goya, the burgeoning culture of Orientalist narratives and imagery on the other, and the phenomenon of looting which resulted in a near-encyclopaedic collection of European masterpieces at the Louvre.

The series is part of the Institute’s Showcasing Art History series which aims to share the latest art-historical thinking and The Courtauld’s teaching and research with the wider public. It is open to anyone over the age of 18. Each new season offers three free-standing terms. The autumn term lectures in 2021 will be delivered online. The plan is for the spring and summer term lectures to be given in the Institute’s lecture theatre at Vernon Square, but they will also be recorded and made available to online audiences, who will be given their own live Zoom discussion sessions.

For more information, fees and booking forms see the Courtauld’s website