Empire style

• 1. Introduction

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  The Empire style took its name from an emperor. It originated under the rule of Napoleon I during the First French Empire, and it was built to flatter him. Every eagle, every bee, every laurel crown was meant to idealize Napoleon's leadership and the French state itself. This early 19th-century design movement reached into architecture, furniture, the decorative arts, and the visual arts. It flourished between 1799 and 1815, across the Consulate and the First French Empire, though its influence lingered into the late 1820s. From France it traveled across much of Europe and into the United States. Why did a fashion in chairs and clocks carry political weight? How did stoic Roman virtue give way to florid Roman opulence? And how did a style tied to one defeated ruler outlive him by more than a century?

• 2. From Austerity To Opulence

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  The Directoire style came first, a more austere and minimalist form of Neoclassicism that had replaced the Louis XVI style. It aimed at a simpler but still elegant evocation of the virtues of the ancient Roman Republic. The stoic virtues of Republican Rome were held up as standards not only for the arts but for political behaviour and private morality. Conventionnels saw themselves as antique heroes. Children were named after Brutus, Solon, and Lycurgus. The painter David staged the festivals of the Revolution as antique rituals. He even designed the chairs in which the committee of Salut Public sat, made on antique models. The Empire style broke from that severity and brought a full return to ostentatious richness. As the description goes, it turned to the florid opulence of Imperial Rome, where the abstemious severity of Doric was replaced by Corinthian richness and splendour. Between the two stood a brief transitional Consulate style, more formal and rectangular, which introduced many Empire motifs and drew inspiration from the French campaign in Egypt and Syria.

• 3. Architects Of An Empire

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  Two French architects, Percier and Fontaine, were together the creators of the French Empire style. Both had studied in Rome, and in the 1790s they became leading furniture designers in Paris. There they received many commissions from Napoleon and other statesmen. Percier and Fontaine served as Napoleon's architects for Malmaison, and their inventive designs popularized the period. They borrowed symbols and ornaments from the ancient Greek and Roman empires. Architecture of the style rested on elements of the Roman Empire and its archaeological treasures, which had been rediscovered starting in the eighteenth century. The preceding Louis XVI and Directoire styles had used straighter, simpler designs than the Rococo style of the eighteenth century. Empire designs strongly influenced the American Federal style, including the design of the United States Capitol building. Both were described as forms of propaganda through architecture. The style was said to have liberated and enlightened architecture, just as the propaganda claimed Napoleon had liberated the peoples of Europe with his Napoleonic Code.

• 4. Mahogany And Ormolu

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  Buildings of the period typically had simple timber frames and box-like constructions. These were veneered in expensive mahogany imported from the colonies. The related Biedermeier furniture used ebony details, originally because of financial constraints. Ormolu details, the gilded bronze furniture mounts and embellishments, displayed a high level of craftsmanship. France's debts created an unexpected trade in that bronze. The country paid some of what it owed to Sweden in ormolu bronzes rather than money. That arrangement led to a vogue for crystal chandeliers that combined bronze from France with crystal from Sweden. The Swedish connection ran deeper still through a single soldier. General Bernadotte, who later became King Karl Johan of Sweden and Norway, introduced the Napoleonic style to Sweden, where it took his own name. The Karl Johan style stayed popular in Scandinavia even after the Empire style had vanished from other parts of Europe.

• 5. A Language Of Symbols

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  All Empire ornament is governed by a rigorous spirit of symmetry, reminiscent of the Louis XIV style. The motifs on a piece's right and left sides usually correspond in every detail. When they do not, the individual motifs are themselves entirely symmetrical: antique heads with identical tresses falling onto each shoulder, frontal figures of Victory with symmetrically arrayed tunics, identical rosettes or swans flanking a lock plate. Like Louis XIV, Napoleon kept a set of emblems unmistakably tied to his rule. The most notable were the eagle, the bee, stars, and the initials I for Imperator and N for Napoleon, often inscribed within an imperial laurel crown. The wider vocabulary drew heavily on the ancient world: figures of Nike bearing palm branches, Greek dancers, winged putti, swans, lions, sphinxes, sea horses, and climbing grape vines. There were stiff and flat acanthus leaves, palmettes, cornucopias, amphoras, tripods, caduceuses of Mercury, and especially lyres. Notably, the fluting and triglyphs so common under Louis XVI were abandoned despite their antique origin. Egyptian Revival motifs were especially common at the start of the period, including scarabs, lotus capitals, winged disks, obelisks, pyramids, and caryatids supported on bare feet.

• 6. Monuments And Interiors

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  The Arc de Triomphe of the Place de l'Étoile is the most famous of the Empire-style structures in France. Alongside it stand the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the Vendôme column, and La Madeleine, all built in Paris to emulate the edifices of the Roman Empire. The style also spread widely in Imperial Russia, where it served a pointed purpose. There it was used to celebrate the victory over Napoleon, in memorial structures such as the General Staff Building, Kazan Cathedral, the Alexander Column, and the Narva Triumphal Gate. The Royal Palace of Amsterdam holds a complete collection of Empire furniture from the time of Louis Bonaparte, the largest such collection outside France. Inside these buildings, rooms were spacious and richly decorated with symmetrically arranged motifs. Walls carried Corinthian pilasters and vertical panels topped by a decorative frieze, covered with monumental paintings, stuccos, or embroidered silks, while the ceilings used light colours and fine ornaments. Homogeneous interiors of the early 19th century survive at sites including the Château de Malmaison, the Hôtel de Beauharnais in Paris, the Château de Compiègne, the Château de Fontainebleau, and the Casa del Labrador in Spain.

• 7. Afterlives Of The Style

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  After Napoleon lost power, the Empire style stayed in favour for many decades with only minor adaptations. A revival came in the last half of the nineteenth century in France, again at the beginning of the twentieth century, and once more in the 1980s. In Italy the style survived longer than in most of Europe. Part of the reason lay in its Imperial Roman associations, and part in its revival as a national style of architecture following the unification of Italy in 1870. Mario Praz wrote about this version as the Italian Empire. Elsewhere the style bent to local conditions and acquired new names. In the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, it grew into the Egyptian Revival, Greek Revival, Biedermeier style, Regency style, and late-Federal style. Its grandest echo arrived much later and far to the east. The more bombastic type of Stalinist architecture is sometimes called Stalin's Empire style, which the Soviet Union exported to the wider Soviet bloc.