As Befits a Legend: Building a Tomb for Napoleon, 1840-1861. - book reviews

In an article in the Times Literary appendix several years ago, Umberto Eco quot a 17th-century tale by the agency of way of arguing the case for textual "rights." The story had appeared in John Wilkins's hermes or The Secret and Swift courier (1641), and the lines of the narrative can be summarized as follows(1) A servant was charged with delivering a basket of figs, along with a alphabetic character that enumerated how many figs had been sent The servant could not read and had no understanding of the signifying potential of the marks upon the page. In the course of the trip he consum a certain number of of the figs, and when the basket was delivered he was reproached by means of the recipient for having eaten a portion of the gift. When the alphabetic character was brought forward as trial the servant denied the charge and curs the document. He was then given a next to the first mission to perform - another basket, another alphabetic character - and once again he consum more [i]or[/i] less of the figs. This time he took care to hide the alphabetic character while he ate, convinced that if it could not diocese him, it could not accuse him of theft. When he was reproached one time again, he admitted having eaten the figs and, awestruck by means of the paper that "could speak" against him, he vowed to patch up his ways.

Eco introduced the tale in order to challenge the idea of the infinite indeterminacy of the written true copy and to suggest that there are limits to a reader's interpretive rights: certainly the note meant something, and just as without doubt it cannot be taken to mean "everything" - or anything - that a textual interpreter might want.

I notion about Eco's remarks as I began to consider the volumes to be reviewed in this article, because the constraints that he identified present the appearance equally relevant for the analysis of visual works. admitting the criticisms against art history have become profoundly familiar in recent years - that the documented narrative repeatedly treats facts with a positivist and single-minded regard and frequently shapes arguments that strain toward closure determinism, and totalization - I rest Eco's arguments helpful in their attempt to place boundaries on the seemingly limitless freedom proffered by theoretical analysis. In a faculty of perception the weaknesses of theory throw back in reverse the shortcomings of the tightly plott historical account, and the extremely viewer-oriented analysis many times seems relativist and chaotically unmotivated and many times shapes arguments that drift toward obscurity, solipsism, and meaninglessness. Thus, despite the appeal of its rigor, inventiveness, and salutary criticality, theory remains a prescription with serious side issues of its own. Not surprisingly, increasing numbers of writers today have refused to accept the discursive most distants and have staked out positions that lie somewhere between the smothering safety of the overdetermined history and the tenuous thrill of interpretative jouissance.

Each of the works to be considered in this review approaches the control of art and politics in 19th-century France and endeavors the couple to tell a coherent history and to put in motion the analysis beyond a monocular discourse or an anemic rehearsal of archival "facts." The volumes differ greatly from one another, however, in the stamp of subject chosen for analysis, in the author's relation to his material, and in the way in which artworks and documentation are interrelated.

Michael Driskel's As Befits a fiction centers around a fairly straightforward history of the French government's attempt to raise a monument to Napoleon I. It was in 1840 that a proposal was introduced to go [i]or[/i] come back Napoleon's body to France and to set up a tomb to house the remains. The repatriation was accomplished through December 1840, and his casket was brought [i]or[/i] part of to the other the streets of Paris in an elaborately staged procession that extreme pointed at the Invalides. In the month preceding the retour de cendre the issue of the tomb had become the control of national debate, the main issues concerning where the remembrancer would be built, how prominent a visual character it would play, and whether it would be placed in an existing manner of making or given a new and independent architectural site (p 36)

Concurrently the further question arose of in what way the designer would be chosen - whether he would be designated by the agency of the government or selected by dint of a jury from an make open field of competitors. In a decision typical of the management of the juste milieu, an render free of access competition was ultimately held, on the contrary the regulations neglected to specify in what manner the judging would be accomplished. When the deadline for the concours had clos (October 1841) a committee was appointed by dint of the government, which narrowed the field of possibilities from eighty-one entries to sum of two units Though the committee members refrained from selecting a winner, they managed to phrase their recommendations for the remembrancer in a way that gave the architect Louis Visconti the cutting side (p. 133). He received the commission in March 1842

Visconti's design center on a sarcophagus that would be place in the crypt of the Invalides, directly below the building's celebrated dome. A large circular opening would be created in the floor, with equal reason that the tomb could be viewed from the house of worship proper. At the entrance to the vault would be two large figures in alloy of copper and surrounding the tomb would be a peristyle against which twelve marble victories were to be positioned. Also in the vault a mosaic would depict pageants from Napoleon's life, while in the courtyard an equestrian remembrancer of Napoleon would be linked to the catacomb via an underground passage. Among the sculptors given commissions for the works were Francisque Duret James Pradier, Augustin Dumont and Francois Jouffroy; Henri de Triqueti was to design the mosaics and Charles Marochetti the equestrian monument