# Transcript

Presenter
A very different Josephine can be founding her private portraits such as this one by Prudhon.
Tony Halliday.
We can see looking at portraits of Josephine, although she tried to develop a cult of being an empress of the old stamp as it were, her portraits do concentrate on privacy and evocation, of private and fleeting moments of feeling, in a way that the portraits of Marie-Antoinette for example, under the old regime, never would have done. This is the private life of the great that's being exhibited, not just their public face. To that extent, the Revolution in portraiture has had a permanent affect on the significance with which people endow private feelings and private experience, exhibited in public.
Emma Barker
In the portrait by Prudhon, Josephine is shown in the grounds of her country retreat the Chateau of Malmaison, which she had transformed into an elegant and luxurious house, decorated in the most fashionable taste. One of the most opulent rooms in the Chateau is her bedroom which is decorated to look like a tent. It is dominated by a magnificent carved and gilded bed ornamented with swans. Josephine had chosen the swan, an attribute of Venus, the classical goddess of love and beauty as her personal emblem.
Presenter
Josephine's sister in law, Pauline, had a similarly elaborate bed in the grand Parisian house that she bought for herself in 1803, at which time she was a young widow. It is surmounted by a canopy ornamented with an imperial eagle, and is richly carved and gilded with Egyptian figures and recumbent lions in the style made fashionable by Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.
Contemporary commentators describe Pauline as a great beauty. We see her here in a portrait of 1808 by Robert Le Fevre. She's wearing a Court dress of white satin embroidered in gold with classical cameos at her waist, and in her tiara. The portrait includes a bust of Napoleon towards which Pauline looks and gestures. She was apparently his favourite sister, even though her scandalous behaviour was completely at odds with his expectations of proper feminine conduct.
In 1803 he arranged her marriage to an immensely rich young Roman prince, Camilo Borghese. The marriage completely failed to subdue Pauline, who spent very little time in Italy, and went on to take many lovers. It did however give rise to the creation of one of the most remarkable portraits of the period.
This is the sculpture of Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix which was commissioned by her husband in 1804 from the Italian sculptor, Antonio Canova, the most famous artist in Europe at the time. The commission marked the occasion of Napoleon's coronation.
Canova originally proposed to depict her as Diana, the chaste goddess of the hunt, but Pauline rejected the idea, and instead demanded to be portrayed as Venus, the goddess of love and beauty.
Her elegant reclining pose is reminiscent of many previous paintings of a naked Venus, but a naked portrait was far from usual, and indeed quite shocking.
According to one of the many anecdotes that were told about the sculpture, when asked if she herself had actually posed nude for Canova, Pauline replied 'oh but the studio was heated'.
The sculpture can be compared to David's painting of Madame Recamier as another reclining portrait of a famously beautiful woman. Though otherwise there could hardly be a greater contrast between the cool reserve of the one, and the imperious eroticism of the other. After the sculpture was placed in the Villa Borghese in 1814, visitors to Rome flocked to see it. However, access was controlled, and sometimes restricted by Camilo Borghese. The irony of this is that he never had such authority over his wife herself, as he did over the statue of her.
Emma Barker
Napoleon’s youngest sister Caroline married one of her brother’s Generals, Joachim Murat in 1800. Murat was made King of Naples in 1808 thus extending Napoleonic Rule to Southern Italy. We see Caroline here in a portrait by Ingres painted in 1814, standing in front of a view across the Bay of Naples towards Mount Vesuvius. Caroline is clad entirely in black and standing very upright in front of a desk. She’s an authoritative figure quite unlike the seated whiteclad woman shown in most of the other portraits we have looked at. Ingres, unusually portrayal of Caroline can be related to the public role that she played. At the time this portrait was painted, she was ruling Naples as Regent in the absence of her husband. She was regarded as an ambitious and powerful woman by her contemporaries. They disapproved of her failure to conform to the prevailing expectations of passive and dutiful womanhood. Napoleon himself said of his sister, she has Cromwell’s head on a pretty woman’s body.