Abstract

This essay uses the work of the French artist Antoine-Jean Gros as a prompt to reconsider the means by which historical meaning was narrated and disseminated in Napoleonic France, analysing several interrelated pictorial, discursive, and material practices. It proposes that several of Gros’s large-scale paintings participated in an early nineteenth-century model of historical meaning that was characterized by dispersal and aggregation, by fragmentation and proliferation. The study looks first at the ascendance of history as a popular genre or medium, then at the literal means by which historical signifiers were collected during Napoleon Bonaparte’s military campaigns, and subsequently disseminated textually and pictorially, before finally returning to Gros. In doing so, an essentially cumulative form of historical meaning emerges that can be traced across a range of locations and modalities in Napoleonic France.

摘要

本文以法国艺术家安托万·让·格罗斯（Antoine-Jean Gros）的作品为提示，重新考虑拿破仑时期法国历史叙述和传播的方式，分析了几种相互关联的绘画，话语和物质实践。它提出格罗斯的几幅大型画作参与了19世纪早期的历史意义模型，其特征是分散和聚集，破碎和扩散。该研究首先考察了历史作为一种流行的流派或媒介的兴起，然后考察了在拿破仑·波拿巴的军事战役中收集历史标志物的字面意思，然后以文字和图片形式进行传播，然后最终返回格罗斯。这样，基本上是累积的 历史意义的形式出现了，可以追溯到拿破仑法国的各种地点和方式。