“You will return to your homes only under the triumphal arches”. This from Napoleon was a promise to his army that the French general did not intend to forget. So he entrusted to Dominique Vivant Denon his most important collaborator, responsible for the artistic policy of the Empire and director of the Napoleon Museum (now renamed Louvre) the task of realizing this promise above the Carousel Arch, a important sculpted decoration homage by the Emperor to his great army which had beated (until that moment) half of Europe. Thanks to the joint presentation of drawings and sculpted sketches, as well as a life-size plaster cast of a soldier statue, this exhibition hosted in the Louvre evokes the reality of an ambitious project that was completed by Denon in just two years. By coordinating the work of eighteen sculptors, Denon was able to offer the Parisian public a coherent whole and a complete project. An enterprise that allowed an entire generation of artists to renew themselves by sculpting the contemporary history of their country in stone and marble, modifying the genre of the neoclassical relief and the full-length monumental statue. The exhibition is completed with the display of the Statue of Napoleon created by the sculptor François-Frédéric Lemot and which was supposed to surmount the Arc du Carusel to complete the triumphal Napoleonic project.
