Reviewed by: Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres and David Andrew Carrington Shelton Porterfield, Todd, and Susan L. Siegfried. Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres and David. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. 287. ISBN 0-2710-2858-0 In an innovative collaborative effort that subverts the individualist ethos dominating modern art historical scholarship, Todd Porterfield and Susan L. Siegfried offer profound and original analyses of two of the most important artistic monuments of the Napoleonic [End Page 146] era: J.-A.-D. Ingres's Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne and Jacques-Louis David's Sacre. The implications of this study reach far beyond the twin foci provided by these two paintings, however, as Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David offers not only a sustained examination of the social, political, and cultural forces impacting artistic production during the First Empire, but a broad-ranging and provocative meditation on the political efficacy of art throughout the modern (i.e., post-Revolutionary) period. Siegfried's contribution, which focuses on Ingres, represents the fruit of over twenty years' work on that artist. In 1980, she published what turned out to be a rather controversial article on Napoleon I, claiming that the picture, long assumed to be commissioned specifically to hang in the Corps Législatif, was, in fact, produced by Ingres on his own initiative as a means of attracting attention to himself at the Salon. Many historians (myself included) accepted this idea; others, particularly in France, have vigorously disputed it, arguing that it is absolutely unthinkable that a young and relatively inexperienced artist would undertake such a monumental and politically sensitive painting of his own accord. While continuing to shore up her original assertions regarding the genesis of the painting, Siegfried shifts the focus of her analysis in the present volume from the circumstances of the picture's production (the evidence for which is ultimately inconclusive) to a consideration of the thematic and stylistic peculiarities of the work that made it so controversial upon its unveiling at the 1806 Salon. She presents Ingres's portrait as a highly original and insightful if ultimately misguided and politically unviable response to the fundamental instability of the Napoleonic regime, one in which the traditional foundations of legitimacy and authority — bloodlines and divine right — being no longer functional, were replaced with an improvised symbolism of (often phony) relics and historicizing regalia. These circumstances, according to Siegfried, account for the most bizarre and disconcerting aspect of Ingres's canvas: the virtual disappearance of Napoleon's body beneath a surfeit of meticulously treated costume and accouterments. The problem, Siegfried argues, is that Ingres understood the situation facing the new Emperor only too well: his picture, by insisting so baldly and emphatically on the role of symbolic trappings in establishing the legitimacy of Napoleon's authority, ultimately served to call attention to their strained artificiality and, by extension, to the fundamental instability of the regime they sought to uphold. Siegfried supports her assertions with a careful analysis of the machinations of various government officials intent on blunting the impact of Napoleon Enthroned and of the universally negative critical reaction elicited by the work when it was unveiled at the 1806 Salon. She regards the label "Gothic" that was famously attached to the portrait on that occasion as indicative not only of narrowly æsthetic prejudices on the part of convention-bound critics, but of more diffuse "collective fantasies" relating to fears of despotism and social degeneration as well. In one of the most insightful turns of her analysis, Siegfried also posits the critical failure of Napoleon I as symptomatic of the emergence of a specifically modern polarization of ideology and æsthetics, arguing that, while the disaster provoked by Ingres's political miscalculation of 1806 led to nearly two decades of critical opposition and official neglect, it also instilled in the artist a kind of uncompromising æsthetic anti-authoritarianism that was largely responsible for the astounding originality of many of his subsequent works. In the second half of the volume, Porterfield uses David's Sacre to explore the other side of the artistic/political binary established with Napoleon I: ideological service-ability [End Page 147] coupled with æsthetic impoverishment. In contrast to...