Denon and David

 Among the many sketches by the artist Denon is one of the medieval bathhouse. He also draws the sagging quays of the harbor, and the shuttered houses of the deserted streets. He even manages to capture “the universal silence and sadness” that he writes about in his journal.

As always, he is conscientious and hardworking when recording what he sees. For as an artist Denon has the technique that may be acquired in an academy, but none of the inspiration which cannot be taught. At fifty-one, he is a brilliant dilettante with a talent for living and an ability to laugh at fortune and its reversals.

In his youth, he had aspired to be a diplomat and was attached to the French embassy first in Switzerland, then Italy, then Russia. His good looks and charm caught the attention of Catherine the Great. Whether he also won the all-important approval of her “tester,” Countess Bruce, is not recorded.

Denon is a playwright and a raconteur. His short story Le Pointe de Lendemain (The Sting of the Morning After) won Balzac’s praise as “a school for married men.” He is also something of a pornographer: the etchings in his Oeuvre Priapique can be called nothing else. His eroticism finally gets him into trouble: as a lover of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame Pompadour, he becomes the official caretaker of her antique gems. It is an appointment that would have cost Denon his life during the Terror, if the great artist David had not saved him.

The kindness is uncharacteristic of David. The politically astute David had managed to become not only a member of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety but, for two weeks, its president. During this time he feverishly condemns everyone: fellow artists and former patrons alike. Over four hundred death sentences bearing David’s signature survive, perhaps most tragically, one for the gifted young poet Andrea Chénier, who goes to the scaffold cursing the cruel artist.
It is a mystery then why David—the creator of severe, neoclassical paintings such as The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons and The Oath of the Horatti, examples of Roman courage meant to inspire the revolutionary youth—would stoop to save an artist such as Denon. A dilettante still working in the frivolous prerevolutionary fashion, Denon’s ideals were Cupid Stealing a Nightgown from a Sleeping Maiden and The Swing, a painting in which a husband pushes his wife on a swing while her lover, hidden in the bushes, peeks up her skirts.
With a few cruel strokes of his pen, David is able to capture Marie Antoinette on the way to the guillotine: hands tied behind her, back straight, features ugly with suffering as she stares ahead with unseeing pride. The sketch is characteristic of David. If Denon had drawn it, it would have been his nature to choose the trivial moment just before Antoinette enters the executioner’s tumbrel: to draw her as she calls for her favorite plum-colored shoes and squats to pee next to a wall. Such is the difference between the two artists.

For whatever reason, David saves Denon, having his name taken off the list of the expatriates, a euphemism for the condemned, and putting the artistic ex-lover of Madame Pompadour to work designing uniforms for the revolutionary guard.

This is done with Denon’s usual verve and style. He has talent, though not genius. He never created great epic canvasses for Napoleon like David’s, never achieved the daring of David’s The Death of Marat or the intensity of David’s self-portraits. Denon’s self-portrait, though irresistible for its joie de vivre, is all surface. A lesser artist but a better man than David, Denon’s achievement will be of a different kind.

During his stay in Egypt he will tirelessly, heroically produce thousands of accurate sketches under the most difficult circumstances, drawing unknown temples and forgotten ruins, recording wall after wall of hieroglyphs. These will be of crucial importance for the new discipline being born.
Accompanying the army six hundred miles into southern Egypt, he endures thirst, hunger, scorching heat, and the fatigue of forced marches—hardships which overcome many a younger man.

Undeterred by danger, time and again he will remain behind after his comrades leave to finish a drawing, sometimes escaping death by the skin of his teeth. The unevenness of one sketch, he explained, was due to a shoot-out with a marauder who had suddenly appeared in the desert. Another time, during one of the innumerable desert skirmishes, he risks his life to save that of a black child, mutilated and left to die on the steps of an ancient temple. He will adopt this boy and eventually bring him back to France.

Denon has courage and a devil-may-care attitude. The insouciance that brings him to Egypt in the first place then gets him into a hundred-and-one scrapes . . . starting from the very beginning, from that hot bright day in July (laundry day in the army) when, hearing that his ship, the Juno, is anchored offshore, he decides to row out and retrieve a change of clothes and his belongings.

Since soundings of the harbor have not yet been taken, a process requiring some two weeks, no one knows whether the water is deep enough to accommodate the heavy ships, so the fleet lies exposed at Abukir Bay, some twenty miles to the east. Denon sets out in search of the skiff or rowboat that he’ll need, and perhaps a companion to go with him, first stopping off at headquarters to see what can be found.

The LINGUIST and the EMPEROR
NAPOLEON and CHAMPOLLION’S

QUEST to DECIPHER the ROSETTA STONE
Daniel Meyerson