[SOC] Napoleon ... still and agn

[soc@mailman.qth.net]

Napoleon "accused" in Venice two centuries later [ 2003-01-09 19:14 ]
by Estelle Shirbon ROME (Reuters) - Nearly two centuries after having conquered 
Venice, Napoleon is "prosecuted" by inhabitants of the City of the Doges for 
plundering and destruction of works of art.
As part of a campaign aiming at preventing that a statue of the emperor enters 
a museum of the Saint-Marc place, several Venetian scheduled for next March a 
parody of lawsuit. 
"Indeed, Napoleon played a part in the history of the city. But (the Italian 
dictator Benito) Mussolini too. Must one for that set up a statue in a museum 
to him?", wondered the lawyer Mario d' Elia, who organizes the lawsuit, at the 
time of an interview granted by telephone to Reuters. 
The marble statue realized by Domenico Banti 2,5 meters high puts in scene a 
naked and muscular Napoleon, raising imperiously his right hand, a terrestrial 
sphere in the left hand. It had been ordered by Venetian merchants to thank 
Bonaparte for having made Venice a tax-free zone port.
This statue was located on the Saint-Marc place from 1811 to 1814, year when 
the City of the Doges was taken by the Austrians, and where the statue has be 
transferred to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, located not far. 
"IT WOULD BE LIKE A STATUE OF NELSON IN THE LOUVRE" 
The historians then lost the trace of this work until it reappears last year at 
the time of an auction sale at Sotheby's in New York. It was then bought by a 
French association and the cultural foundation of a Venetian bank which 
received the downstream of the municipality to insert it in the Correr museum 
of Venice "the return of this statue in Venice is explained by the fact that it 
acted of a Venetian work and that Napoleon is also part of the Venetian 
history", considered the French historian Jerome Zieseniss, who chairs the 
association which repurchased the statue. 
D' Elia wishes, by the lawsuit, to mobilize the Venetian ones against this 
project. "It would be like setting up a statue to the glory of (the admiral 
Horacio) Nelson in the Louvre, Paris", he explained. Napoleon is a character 
discussed in the City of the Doges, seen by some like a tyrant who put an end 
to the independence of the city, before plundering and to destroy some of its 
architectural pearls. 
For Zieseniss, few Venetian share this opinion. Napoleon according to him was a 
motive fluid of the political and urban modernization of Venice. 
The two men seem however to share the same artistic reserves on the work 
itself. "It is Napoleon who made body-building and who goes sure of himself 
towards the beach with his towel", Zieseniss declared, by evoking the toga 
which equips the marble statue of Bonaparte.

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Nelson in the Louvre ???? By Jove, JAMAIS !!

72!
Claude