Exhibitions 2
Vivant Denon
(Louvre, Paris, till 17 January)
Rabid collector
Nicholas Powell
Imagine Alastair Campbell, Neil Mac- Gregor, Peter Mandelson and Chris Smith all rolled into one. Even in these days of genetic engineering and unusual Scottish sheep it is an eerie thought. Yet the curi- ously named Frenchman Vivant Denon (1747.1825) was at one and the same time a diplomat, a brown-nosing propagandist, a museum director, an eminence grise, an aes- thete and, to all intents and purposes, min- ister of culture too. He curried favour (in
'Le Baron Vivant Denon, by Prud'hon chronological order) with Louis XV, Louis XVI, Robespierre, Josephine Beauhamais, Napoleon and Louis XVIII. He was ruth- less, ugly and, amazingly, had few enemies. Nicknamed (among many other things, one imagines) 'The eye of Napoleon', a compli- ment he returned by calling the philistine little Corsican 'a blazing star', Denon is now the subject of a major exhibition in the Louvre.
As the first ever director of the Musec Napoleon, as the former royal Louvre palace was then called, Denon not only built up France's national art collections to extraordinary heights but also organised them according to chronology and artistic schools — a novel approach at the time, subsequently copied by every other muse- um in the West. When the Louvre was enlarged in the 1980s, Denon had a wing named after him and it is evidently fair that he be honoured there today. The Louvre's director Pierre Rosenberg, due for retire- ment next year, has been planning this swansong show for several years.
Denon, however, was probably the most ravenous art thief ever known, a rabid col- lector who combed Europe in the wake of Napoleon's armies, sometimes buying and more often confiscating artworks termed, with the extraordinary arrogance of the French Imperial regime, 'revolutionary conquests'. The pillaging (which went on for 20 years in the case of the French occu- pied parts of Italy) is soft-pedalled in the presentation of the exhibition, while the voluminous catalogue uncritically repro- duces Denon's own emphatic pronounce- ments — 'a bountiful harvest of superb pieces' was a typical boast, after he had spent six months assembling and dispatch- ing 250 crates of paintings, sculptures and art objects to Paris from Germany and Poland in the wake of Prussian defeat at lena in 1806. After Waterloo, most of the art was returned to its rightful owners, whose descendants, institutional and pri- vate, have sportingly loaned items for this show.
Fascinatingly and extraordinarily talent- ed as he was in his own, slightly repulsive way, Denon is not good exhibition materi- al. He is the stuff that serious biographies, romantic fantasies and learned essays arc made of. A show like this, however, in which over 600 pieces of not always very beautiful art are presented not for their aesthetic interest but in order to illustrate aspects of Denon's career does not make for compulsive viewing. There are, for example, no fewer than 60 portraits of Denon himself, which is bordering on greed.
The first part of the exhibition is housed in the Chapel of the Louvre, atop 112 steps or via a lift for the gravitationally chal- lenged, and contains an array of drawings and engravings by Denon, showing just what a good draughtsman he was. Appoint- ed diplomatic attache to Naples in 1776, Denon sketched Emma Hamilton (not shown here) and spied on Queen Marie- Caroline, Marie-Antoinette's sister, send- ing detailed reports of her unofficial love life back to Paris. Later, in Venice, Denon spent huge sums collecting engravings, only to be asked to leave on account of a series of soft porn prints he did himself: one, entitled `le Phallus phenomenal', is on show in the Louvre.
Much too ancien regime for his own good in revolutionary Paris, Denon gained the favours of the painter Jacques-Louis David, who duly declared him to be 'tin bon patri- ote'. Once his own head was safe, the for- mer diplomat started drawing aristocrats and other politically incorrect characters on their way to the guillotine. They are highly competent, moving works, and include one of the dripping, severed head of Robespierre — a former protector of Denon, as it happens.
Having wormed himself into the good graces of Josephine Beauharnais, Denon got early wind of Napoleon's top-secret Egyptian expedition and got signed up for the trip. One hundred and fifty of his sketches of Ancient Egyptian monuments are now in the British Museum and dozens more are hanging today in the Louvre. Pas- sionately interested in the brand-new field of Egyptian studies, Denon let neither art nor research stand in the way of promo- tion. Hearing Napoleon was about to aban- don his troops and return to France to stage his coup d'etat, Denon went home in the same boat. His career was assured.
Among the works of art which are worth a look at in this show are the Italian primi- tives and Renaissance paintings which, never recuperated in 1815, now hang in the Louvre and in French provincial museums. They include 'Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata' by the Florentine Giotto di Bon- done, which comprises the famous scene of the saint preaching to the birds; Lorenzo di Credit serenely beautiful 'Virgin and Child with Saint Julian and Saint Nicholas of Myre' and Carlo Braccesco's Annunciation Triptych.
An entire room of paintings from the Salon of 1808 (Denon was director of that, too), intended to make French art pre-emi- nent in the world, gives an insight into the aesthetic values of the period, while pieces from Denon's personal collection — one of the most interesting facets of the exhibition — reveal how extraordinarily varied his own tastes were. When the Allies demand- ed and got their art back in 1815 (not hav- ing given it much attention before Napoleon's return from Elba), Denon, who had quickly ingratiated himself with Louis XVIII, saw the rapid collapse of his grandiose achievement, a museum packed with the greatest masterpieces of Europeah art. For the first time in his career he resigned and consoled himself by admiring his own vast collection in his apartments on the Quai Voltaire, over on the Left Bank, from whence, as it happens, he enjoyed an excellent view of the Louvre.
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