Portrait of Napoléone Elisa Baciocchi, Niece of Napoleon I (1810–12): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Napoléone Elisa Baciocchi, Niece of Napoleon I (1810–12) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Lorenzo Bartolini (Italian, 1777–1850).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

To extend power across the continent, Napoleon arranged for his sisters to marry into the courts of Europe. The sitter is his niece, daughter of the Grand-Duke of Tuscany (the bee on her cup is a Napoleonic emblem). While the girl’s nakedness might startle us today, in the early 1800s depicting children nude emphasized their purity and innocence. The work takes its cues from ancient sculpture, and while the pet dog adds a note of tenderness, it also refers to Diana, goddess of the moon and hunt.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Napoléone Elisa Baciocchi, Niece of Napoleon I
• Date: 1810–12
• Creator attribution: Lorenzo Bartolini (Italian, 1777–1850)
• Culture: Italy, 19th century
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 113 x 39.1 cm (44 1/2 x 15 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Sculpture 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1979.37

A detail from the museum

Felice Pasquale Baciocchi, the father of the subject of this sculpture, was an avid violinist and studied with violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini for a decade.

Collection credit

The Thomas L. Fawick Memorial Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Thomas L. Fawick Memorial Collection is on View in Year in Review Exhibition,” February 7, 1980, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1979." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 67, no. 3 (1980): 58-99.
• Luxenberg, Alisa. “Befitting the Bonapartes: Bartolini’s Portrait of Napoléone Baciocchi as a ‘Naturalized’ Mythological Allusion.” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 2 (1997): 16–31.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.