Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, work by, Giuseppe Ceracchi

Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte

Giuseppe Ceracchi

Displayed in:

Palazzo Coronini Cronberg Foundation

Viale XX Settembre, 14, Gorizia

Closed today: open Wednesday at 10:00

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As documented by a series of letters, the attribution to Giuseppe Ceracchi of the marble bust depicting a young Napoleon Bonaparte matured starting in the early 1960s, thanks to the research carried out personally by Count Guglielmo Coronini, to his contacts with the Amarican scholar Ulysse Desportes and compared with a print of the English engraver Henry Richter, dated 1801, where the following inscription appears: “engraved […] from the celebrated Bust by Ceracchi lately brougth from Paris and now in his Possession”. The print, of which the count had a photograph preserved together with the aforementioned correspondence, actually shows a work very similar to the Coronini bust, with the only difference that, as Guglielmo himself pointed out, the one worn by Napoleon is the crossed tunic by Marengo and of the first consulate, and not the straight one of the first campaign in Italy depicted in the Gorizia specimen, therefore datable to 1796-1797. Although Desportes had never expressed himself clearly for the attribution to Ceracchi, it was thanks to his reports that on the occasion of the monographic exhibition organized in 1989 at the Palazzo dei conservatori in Rome, Count Coronini was contacted by the curators who asked for a loan of the work. , confirming the Roman artist's autograph. The hypothesis is that the Gorizia specimen is actually the one depicted in Richter's print and that it was made immediately after the sculptor's first meeting with Bonaparte, which took place in Paris at the beginning of 1796. At the time Ceracchi was already a well-known artist and claimed that he had worked all over Europe and the United States, but that he had also made himself known for his democratic and Jacobin ideas. A supporter of the Italian Campaign, he became one of the most listened to advisers of the young general, who wanted him with him in Milan. Here Ceracchi painted a stately old-fashioned portrait for Napoleon, very distant, in spirit and setting, from the Coronini one. In fact, everyone agrees in recognizing that the Gorizia bust was certainly made from life, since, as Count Guglielmo himself underlines, the sickly and tired expression and the irregularities and asymmetries of the face make the image far from any idealization and any attempt at heroic emphasis.

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Title: Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte

Author: Giuseppe Ceracchi

Date: 1796 ca

Technique: Marble

Displayed in: Palazzo Coronini Cronberg Foundation

Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte

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