Napoleon Bonaparte concluded a peace with the papal states in 1797, and the French army occupied the city of Rome in 1798, deposing and imprisoning Pope Pius VI. A Roman republic, supported by the French, lasted from 1798 until 1799, but the French stayed on the Italian Peninsula, and Rome was reoccupied by French troops in 1800 and again in 1808.
In 1809 the French prefect Camille de Tournon arrived in Rome to help manage its antiquities. Archaeological work in the city had continued during the past decade, despite the occupations and withdrawals of armies, presided over by a new commissioner of antiquities, Carlo Fea. Appointed by the new
II Colosseo, a painting of the Coliseum by Antonio Canaletto. (Corel)
Pope, Pius VII, Fea’s task was to replace the ancient sculptures taken by the French army to Paris with new and even better examples of classical art.
In 1809 the occupation government or “consulta” established a commission to inspect and preserve Roman monuments. Commission members were de Tournon; Fea; the sculptor Canova, who was president of the Academy of St Luke; and two architects, Giuseppe Valadier and Giuseppe Cam-porese. The commission passed new laws preventing the illegal excavation and export of antiquities. In 1810 the commission was enlarged to fourteen, adding artists and antiquarians to its expert membership.
At the same time the commission designated six sites to be excavated by the architects Valadier and Camporese: the Forum Boarium, part of the Forum Romanum, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Colosseum, the Domus Aurea, and the Arch ofJanus. The diggers comprised 800 unemployed and poor men, women, and children of Rome, who were paid one franc per cubic meter of earth and were fed once a day.
This investment in the archaeology of Rome was partly political, providing employment for the Roman poor, who had become even more disadvantaged because of the lack of church charities. All of the French generals and their armies who had occupied Rome, despite looting, had respected Rome’s monuments and past, and French republicanism was supported by many Romans. But French respect for Roman antiquity was also part of the French Empire’s identification with the ancient Roman Empire, an ideology that managed to survive the ancient regime and the revolution. De Tournon, nicknamed “Camillo Capitolino,” was appointed to Rome because he was passionately interested in Roman antiquity. However, all of these factors had an impact on the kind of archaeological and conservation and restoration work that the French funded in Rome.
For example, in 1810, the Academia St. Luke was given the inadequate sum of 75,000 francs to repair all of its unearthed classical monuments. At the same time, Martial Daru received 200,000 francs to excavate works of art for French museums. And as they were in Paris, Roman antiquities were used as political symbols by the French, but this time they were used for that end in Rome itself. For example, in 1811, the newly cleared sites of the Forum, the Colosseum, and the area around the Capitol were illuminated to celebrate the birth of Napoleon’s son.
As the result of an interview between De Tournon and Napoleon I in Paris later that year, the Roman excavations received a further one million francs per year, and work was extended to include the Capitol Garden, Trajan’s Forum, and the Pantheon. However, this work was hampered by financial crises caused by the cost of demolitions and Parisian maladministration.
There is little doubt that the monuments of Rome benefited hugely from French funding. The Basilica of Maxentius and the Colosseum were cleared, exposed, and conserved, as were the Domus Aurea and the temples of Vesta and Fortune in the Forum Boarium. In the Forum Romanum substantial clearances uncovered Trajan’s Column. The portico of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina was exposed, as were the temples of the Dioscuri and Saturn. The Temple of Venus and Rome was discovered, the remaining columns of Vespasian rebuilt, and the hill below the Capitol cleared. For the first time in almost 2,000 years almost all of the monuments of ancient Rome could be seen, and modern Roman archaeology was born.
See also Foundation of the French Academy in Rome (1666); Foundation of the Louvre (1779-1793); Napoleon Loots Rome (1797).
Further Reading
Grummond, N. de, ed. 1996. An encyclopedia of the history of classical archaeology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ridley, R. 1992. The eagle and the spade: Archaeology in Rome during the Napoleonic era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
World History
