Some see it not as art, but propaganda, pure and simple. Whatever one might say, though and a lot has been said about Napoleon Crossing the Alps , it is still arguably the most successful portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte that was ever made. Personally, I love it. Completed in four months, from October to January , it signals the dawning of a new century. After a decade of terror and uncertainty following the Revolution, France was emerging as a great power once more.
In May he led his troops across the Alps in a military campaign against the Austrians which ended in their defeat in June at the Battle of Marengo. It is this achievement the painting commemorates. The portrait was commissioned by Charles IV, then King of Spain, to be hung in a gallery of paintings of other great military leaders housed in the Royal Palace in Madrid. Famously, Napoleon offered David little support in executing the painting. This probably accounts for the youthful physique of the figure.
Napoleon, however, was not entirely divorced from the process. And David duly obliged. The fact that Napoleon did not actually lead his troops over the Alps but followed a couple of days after them, traveling on a narrow path on the back of a mule is not the point! Like many equestrian portraits, a genre favored by royalty, Napoleon Crossing the Alps is a portrait of authority. Napoleon is pictured astride a rearing Arabian stallion. Before him to his left we see a mountain, while in the background, largely obscured by rocks, French troops haul along a large canon and further down the line fly the tricolore the national flag of France.
Together with the line of his cloak, these create a series of diagonals that are counterbalanced by the clouds to the right. The overall effect is to stabilize the figure of Napoleon. The landscape is treated as a setting for the hero, not as a subject in itself. On the rock to the bottom left, for instance, the name of Napoleon is carved beside the names of Hannibal and Charlemagne โtwo other notable figures who led their troops over the Alps. David uses the landscape then to reinforce what he wishes to convey about his subject.
In terms of scale alone, Napoleon and his horse dominate the pictorial plane. Taking the point further, if with that outstretched arm and billowing cloak, his body seems to echo the landscape, the reverse might equally hold true, that it is the landscape that echoes him, and is ultimately mastered by his will.
