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Owned by one of the Great Napoleon Print Collectors, Achille Bertarelli.
Conceived as an allegorical manifesto for the young Empire, this large color-printed stipple engraving presents the figure of Renown as the mouthpiece of a nation united behind Napoleon. She streaks across an unbounded sky, her trumpet twisting into a gilded bouquet of twelve cameo-like heads (soldier, magistrate, artisan, even Mamluk) whose variety prefigures the twelve spoken eulogies engraved below. The sweeping ribbons that bind the horn mirror the looping flourishes of the calligraphic texts, visually yoking image and inscription. A continuous panoramic frieze of idealized Mediterranean terrain lies along the lower edge, implying that the Emperor’s beneficence embraces every shore over which the eagle of France might fly.
The dedication “au Peuple Français” sits above an imperial eagle framed by laurel, while the paired columns of cursive orations enumerate the blessings (military glory, social peace, renewed industry, protection of the arts) that each social group attributes to Napoleon’s genius. The voices rise like a chorus, the trumpet’s multi-headed bell literalizing their collective acclaim.
The plate carries the legal-deposit legend “Déposé à la Biblioth. Impériale” together with the artists’ signatures, situating the work in the first flush of imperial cultural policy, when the print trade was mobilised to disseminate the new regime’s universal message of order and achievement.
Jean-Baptiste Verzy, whose signature appears as J. B. Verzy del., seems to have worked in Paris for little more than a decade, roughly from the Consulate through the first years of the Restoration. His surviving production consists almost entirely of stipple or dotted-line engravings celebrating current political events: meetings of monarchs, victories, royal entries, and ingenious folding broadsides that could be re-configured to reveal hidden portraits. A novelty print published by him for the return of Louis XVIII circa 1814 is preserved at the Beinecke Library, Yale, and auction catalogues record several other Napoleonic allegories from 1806–08, confirming Verzy’s role as designer-publisher at the propaganda end of the Paris print trade.
The plate was engraved and color-printed by Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745–1811), painter, print-maker and long-time designer for Oberkampf’s manufactory at Jouy-en-Josas. Elected agréé to the Académie Royale in 1768, Huet perfected the use of stipple and roulette to simulate miniature painting, printing his plates à la poupée in multiple inks before adding transparent washes. That virtuoso handling of tone and colour, familiar today from his animal studies and the Jeux d’enfants series, lends an extraordinary luminosity to the present sheet.
Quite rare; this being the only example we trace in the market.
Provenance
From the collection of Achille Bertarelli (1863–1945), Milan; his small blue ink stamp (Lugt 72) is struck at the lower left, half on the image. Bertarelli adopted this mark in the early years of his collecting and employed it only sparingly before replacing it with the circular AB stamp (Lugt 73) reserved for prints destined for the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense. Because Lugt 72 predates that institutional programme, impressions that carry it were not automatically transferred to Milan and occasionally remained in Bertarelli’s personal holdings or entered the market through later dispersal. As usual, the sheet has been trimmed to roughly a centimetre beyond the platemark, an idiosyncratic measure Bertarelli believed would deter thieves while leaving the documentary value intact.
Achille Bertarelli grew up in Milan during the Risorgimento’s final after-glow and devoted his life to creating what he called an “iconographic archive” of Italian history in printed form. From the mid-1890s he scoured dealers’ stock and auction rooms for every sort of sheet (news broadsides, popular songs, proclamations, caricatures) trusting paper ephemera to reveal the texture of public life more vividly than oil paintings or monumental sculpture. Within that vast enterprise, Napoleonic imagery occupied a privileged place. He regarded the French occupation of 1796–1814 as a hinge between the Old Regime and modern Italy and believed that the republican ideals and administrative reforms imported by Bonaparte had set the peninsula on the long road to unification. To document those years, he amassed many thousands of portraits, battle views, satirical prints and proclamations, and in 1903 he distilled part of that material into Iconografia napoleonica 1796-1799, a hand-printed quarto that records Italian-made portraits of Bonaparte’s first campaign and remains a standard reference.
