King of Kings

Jean-Leon Gerome, Napoleon Before the Sphinx, 1868

We looked at this picture a couple of weeks back in my Eakins class, and I forgot to post about it, but for some reason it popped into my head in the shower today. This is a work by Eakins' master at the Ecole in Paris, the famous Neoclassicist painter Gerome. Gerome did many paintings touting the exploits of Napoleon, which suited the era--this was the time of the Second Empire in France under Napoleon III.

Most people in the class saw this as a propaganda piece, but I think it can also be read as a suggestion of the ultimate fate of any empire. Think of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" of 1818 in relationship to this painting:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.