200 years ago, Napoleon threw himself a spectacular coronation ceremony at Notre-Dame Cathedral. He then hired the artist Jacques-Louis David to commemorate it all on a canvas measuring over 500 square feet. Both outsized acts suggest that Napoleon was an early 19th-century leader with an almost 20th-century understanding of the cult of political personality and the sophisticated craft of shaping public image.

David's enormous ode to power is a sublime piece of political propaganda, as meticulously crafted as the ceremony it depicts. But even though it is one of David's most well-known works, it is considered by some to be far from his best. Earlier classically-inspired hymns to Revolutionary ideals (Oath of the Horatii, Brutus) are what made the artist's reputation in the 1780s.

The same Revolutionary ideals celebrated in those works--of duty to country over family for example--would eventually get David into serious trouble. In the first gallery of the exhibition, you'll find David's Self-Portrait from 1794, painted while in prison for his association with Robespierre. David would later accomplish a phoenix-like political recovery to go on to become one of Napoleon's most trusted image-crafters. This kind of diplomatic finesse would come in handy when negotiating--over a two-year period of work--the details of the Coronation commission.

David attended the 1804 ceremony, and made some pencil sketches in situ. Initially, he planned to represent the unenthusiastic Pope Pius VII--literally dragged to Paris from Rome--as he saw him that December day, sitting at the altar with his hands resting on his lap. But when Napoleon visited David's studio in 1808 to check on the work's progress, he scolded his painter: "I didn't have him come so far to do nothing!" In the final painting, David has Pius lifting his hand in a half-hearted blessing gesture. He also lowered the Pope's chair so that Napoleon would appear relatively larger, with his back symbolically turned towards the dwarfed and older man.

That change--along with the inclusion of Napoleon's crusty Corsican mother among the 150 figures in the painting--was made to appease a savvy and demanding patron. (Madame Mère didn't even make her son's ceremony; she intentionally arrived late in Paris to miss it). Other modifications were more subtle. Le Sacre--what the French call the painting--doesn't exactly capture what is going on in the final work. Napoleon is actually crowning Josephine, his first wife. David decided to feature this moment in the ceremony to make Napoleon appear more generous and less self-serving. Earlier sketches, once again, reveal his thought process. David first intended to depict Napoleon lowering the laurel wreath on his own head. When he eventually changed the emperor's position on the canvas, David used that empty space to include a priest with the traits of Julius Ceasar, making a suggestive link between the past and present, between the French and Roman empires.

This focus on Josephine's crowning, some historians believe, was also a way to highlight the future of the Napoleonic Empire. This was the woman, after all, who would (theoretically) bear Napoleon's heir. To that end, David painted the 41-year old Empress to appear much younger than she does in a far more sensitive, intimate pencil sketch (see below). When a visitor to his studio noted that David had made Josephine look too youthful in the final painted version--where she loses the double chin from the tender drawing--the painter retorted: "Eh bien, allez le lui dire!" (Oh yeah? Go tell that to her).

Most of these heavily symbolic objects were supposed to have belonged to Emperor Charlemagne himself. This was another politically expedient, if not entirely accurate link to the past. The whole event--with its carefully elaborated references to both the past and to the future--took five hours and demanded several costume changes by the Emperor. The white satin tunic that Napoleon wore while the Pope anointed his head and hands in oil (the part of the ceremony to which Le Sacre actually refers) is here. But the imperial robes and gold laurel wreath depicted in the painting were intentionally destroyed in 1819. Only one leaf from the original crown remains, encased like a saint's relic.

In 1819, the cult of personality that Napoleon had masterfully created was too dangerous for his Bourbon successors to have his holy relics lying around. But 200 years later, we can marvel as its creation from a safer--and enormously edifying--distance.