Napoleon at the Great Saint Bernard Pass
Jacques-Louis David (1748 to 1825) · 1801
A young general in a golden cloak points up the mountain while his horse rears on a ledge of rock, mane and tail whipped by the wind. Below, tiny soldiers drag a cannon through the snow. In the rocks at the lower left, carved as if by ancient hands, are three names: Bonaparte, Hannibal and Karolus Magnus, Charlemagne. This is Napoleon crossing the Alps in the spring of eighteen hundred, on his way to defeat the Austrians at Marengo, painted by Jacques-Louis David as the most effective piece of political image-making of its age.
The truth was rather different. Napoleon crossed the pass a few days after his army, on a sure-footed mule led by a local guide, in fine weather. When David asked him to sit, he refused, saying that nobody would care whether the portrait resembled him, only that his genius shone through. David dressed a wooden dummy in the general's uniform and painted the rest from imagination. Look at the calm face against the storm, and at the way the cloak, the horse and the pointing arm all form one rising diagonal. It is a lesson in how to make a small man look like destiny.
David and his workshop produced five versions of the picture. The first went to the king of Spain, who had commissioned it; this one was painted for the Cisalpine Republic in Milan. When the Austrians took Milan it came into Habsburg hands, and so the great propaganda picture of Austria's enemy ended up in Vienna. It is one of the few works of French Neoclassicism in the collection, and it stops most visitors in their tracks.
Did You Know? Napoleon actually crossed the pass on a mule in good weather; he refused to sit for David, so the painter dressed a mannequin in his uniform.
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