SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

Another painting that cast Napoleon in a particularly good light was one specifically
commissioned by him from Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels in Cairo
(1808). It refers to an uprising against the French that occurred in October 1798. The French
had reacted brutally to the rebellion, beheading many of the insurgents and rolling their heads
through the streets. Yet Guérin makes no reference to this brutality, instead portraying a
generous Bonaparte magnanimously pardoning the surviving rebels. Another painting that
made reference to this uprising was Anne-Louis Girodet’s Revolt of Cairo (1810). This was also
commissioned by Napoleon as a pendant to the Guérin, probably in an attempt to stress how
noble and forgiving he had been in pardoning the rebels. But the Revolt of Cairo interests me
for another reason. It is an early attempt to justify what would later be called imperialism. 13
Note how it appears that just one or two Frenchmen seem to be driving back huge masses of
Arabs, thus visually depicting European strength over Oriental weakness. Note too the cruelty
of the Arabs: one has beheaded a French soldier and holds his head by the hair. The severed
head has traditional Christ-like features. The artist’s object here seems to have been to contrast
militant Islam against martyred Christianity. And finally note the nude slave holding the dying
and opulently-clothed pasha in the right foreground. They represent the West’s concepts of the
“corruptions of the East: slavery, voluptuousness, and homosexuality.” 14 Edward Said could
have used this painting as more evidence for the thesis of his well-known book, Orientalism.
Subsequent nineteenth-century French regimes (there were three monarchs, two republics, and
an empire after Napoleon) all used history painting as had Napoleon: to glorify the current
government. History painting had lost its moral purity. It declined for other reasons as well.
Critics as diverse as John Ruskin and Charles Baudelaire ridiculed the style and called for its
end. Patronage shifted to the middle classes who did not want “grand machines” which they
could not afford and for which they had no room to hang in their homes. Instead they sought
landscapes and genre scenes.
History painting did experience a revival in the twentieth century as various totalitarian regimes
found its style congenial. As an example, there is a Chinese communist painting depicting an
incident in the Long March of 1935. Mao’s men are shown crossing a chain bridge over the
Tatu river. Their faces are lit by the fires on the bridge supposedly set by their Nationalist
enemies. In reality, the Nationalists set no fires; they were already captured when the bridge
was crossed. But totalitarian myth-making encouraged these Gros-like distortions of fact.
Although history painting is virtually moribund today, we still occasionally get paintings like
the one by the Hungarian Ferenc Daday depicting then Vice-President Nixon (in an outfit that
screams for a hero’s white cowboy hat) greeting refugees from the Hungarian Revolution of
1956 as they enter neutral Austria. This huge painting (6 by 10 feet) ignores the fact that the
United States encouraged the revolt against the Soviets (in which at least 30,000 Hungarians
died), and then did nothing to help them. We are a far cry from the idealism and civic
humanism of David’s Socrates.
NOTES
1. Quoted by Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980),
p. 20.
2. . John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven:
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