Jacques Marquet de Montbreton, baron de Norvins (Paris, 18 June 1769 - Paris, 30 July 1854) was a French politician and writer, also a soldier, lawyer and administrator. Born into a wealthy family of
tax farmer
Farming or tax-farming is a technique of financial management in which the management of a variable revenue stream is assigned by legal contract to a third party and the holder of the revenue stream receives fixed periodic rents from the contrac ...
s, after
Napoleon came to power, Norvins became and remained a firm supporter, serving as Napoleon's Chief of Police in French-occupied Rome from 1810-14.
Ingres portrait
A portrait of Jacques de Norvins in the
National Gallery, London
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director o ...
was painted by
Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ( , ; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the a ...
in 1811–12, when the sitter was
Napoleon's Chief of Police in Rome. Originally, instead of the curtain at the left, there was a fully painted bust of a boy's head on top of a small column. Probably this was a bust of Napoleon's son, who was known as the
King of Rome
The king of Rome ( la, rex Romae) was the ruler of the Roman Kingdom. According to legend, the first king of Rome was Romulus, who founded the city in 753 BC upon the Palatine Hill. Seven legendary kings are said to have ruled Rome until 509 ...
. The presumption is that this was overpainted with the curtain after the fall of Napoleon, either by Ingres himself, or another artist. The bust can just be made out in the enlarged online photo, with its chin level with the sitter's hair-line; the top of the column was level with the middle of the sitter's ear. These may always have been (just) visible, or have become so by the paint becoming transparent with age. Few viewers of the painting would notice the bust without it being pointed out. Strictly speaking, these alterations might not be described as
pentimenti
A pentimento (plural pentimenti), in painting, is "the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over". The word is , from the verb , meaning 'to repent'.
Significance
Pentimenti may show that ...
, because of the presumed lapse of time, and because another artist may have made the change.
Works
* ''Les Ruines et les monuments, poème dithyrambique'', 1806
* ''Sur la guerre actuelle et ses résultats'', 31 May 1815
* ''De l'intérêt de l'époque actuelle'', 1819
* ''Tableau de la Révolution française, depuis son origine jusqu'en 1814'', 1819
* ''L'Immortalité de l'âme, ou les Quatre âges religieux'', poème en 4 chants, 1822
* ''Portefeuille de 1813, ou Tableau politique et militaire renfermant, avec le récit des événements de cette époque, un choix de la correspondance inédite de l'empereur Napoléon et de celle de plusieurs personnages distingués, soit français, soit étrangers, pendant la première campagne de Saxe, l'armistice de Plesswitz, le congrès de Prague et la seconde campagne de Saxe'', 1825
* ''Histoire de Napoléon'', 1827
He was also (with
Arnault Arnault may refer to:
* Antoine-Vincent Arnault (1766–1834), French dramatist and poet
* Bernard Arnault (born 1949), French businessman
* Delphine Arnault (born 1975), his daughter, a French businesswoman
* Jean Arnault (born 1951), French dip ...
,
Jay and
Jouy Jouy may refer to:
Communes in France
*Jouy, Eure-et-Loir, in the Eure-et-Loir ''département''
*Jouy, Yonne, in the Yonne ''département''
*Jouy-aux-Arches, in the Moselle ''département''
*Jouy-en-Argonne, in the Meuse ''département''
* Jouy-en ...
) one of the authors of th
''Biographie des Contemporains''
References
Sources
*
* Georges Hartmann, ''L'Hôtel, rue d'Anjou, où mourut La Fayette'', Extrait du ''Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique des VIII
e et XVII
e arrondissements'', Paris, Librairie ancienne Édouard Champion, 1921, pp. 23–24
French politicians
1769 births
1854 deaths
French male writers
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