François Carlo Antommarchi

• 1. Introduction

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  François Carlo Antommarchi arrived on the island of Saint Helena on the 10th of September 1819, carrying the weight of an extraordinary assignment. He was a young Italian physician, trained in Livorno and Pisa, and he had been dispatched to the most famous prisoner in the world: Napoleon Bonaparte. The man who had reshaped Europe now spent his days on a remote Atlantic island under British guard, and Antommarchi was there to tend to him.

  Who sent this relatively obscure doctor to such a momentous post? Why did Napoleon himself distrust the man charged with his care? And how did a physician from Corsica end up leaving behind one of the most contested objects in the history of France: the death mask of an emperor? These questions trace a life that moved between courts and revolutions, anatomical theatres and battlefield hospitals, from the salons of Florence to the coffee plantations of Cuba.

• 2. A Corsican Education

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  Antommarchi was born in Morsiglia, on the island of Corsica, on the 5th of July 1780. His early studies took him to Livorno, on the Italian mainland, before he enrolled at the University of Pisa. In March 1808 he earned a degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Medicine there.

  From Pisa he moved to Florence, where he joined the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. By 1812 the University of Florence, then operating under the name of the Imperial University, awarded him a diploma as a surgeon. The university's president appointed him Prosector, a post concerned with preparing dissections and anatomical demonstrations.

  On the 7th of July 1813 Antommarchi began working under Paolo Mascagni, whom the source describes as the most celebrated anatomist of his day. Mascagni had been assembling material for a comprehensive, life-size anatomy atlas: manuscripts, drawings, and engraved plates intended to document the human body at its natural dimensions. Antommarchi's role was to assist in preparing that project for publication. Mascagni died in 1815 before the work was finished, leaving his plates in his student's hands.

• 3. The Emperor's Reluctant Doctor

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  Napoleon's family arranged the appointment. It was his mother, Maria Letizia Ramolino, and his uncle Cardinal Joseph Fesch who put Antommarchi forward for the position. Antommarchi received his formal letter of employment on the 19th of December 1818.

  He was chosen specifically because Napoleon had rejected the alternatives. His British custodian, Sir Hudson Lowe, had proposed Dr Alexander Baxter and Dr James Roch Verling as candidates, but Napoleon refused both men. Antommarchi replaced Dr Barry Edward O'Meara, who had previously held the post.

  Once on the island, the relationship between patient and physician was strained. Napoleon was unimpressed with Antommarchi's medical abilities and dismissed him from service more than once, only to recall him shortly afterward. In Napoleon's final illness, a second doctor was brought in alongside Antommarchi: Dr Archibald Arnott, whose presence was agreed to at the insistence of two of Napoleon's officers, Count Montholon and Grand-Marshal Bertrand. Arnott's acceptance by Napoleon marked a frank acknowledgment that Antommarchi's sole charge of the patient had its limits.

• 4. The Death Mask Controversy

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  Napoleon died, and on the 7th of May 1821 Antommarchi took a plaster cast of the emperor's face. That act produced one of the most debated objects in Napoleonic history.

  The core dispute is whether Antommarchi's original cast survived at all. Reports suggest his cast failed during the process. Dr Francis Burton, apparently, took a second cast that did survive. To complicate matters further, a woman identified in the sources as Madame Bertrand, apparently connected to Henri Gatien Bertrand and present as Napoleon's attendant, is said to have taken a substantial portion of Burton's cast and passed it to Antommarchi.

  No definitive evidence has ever settled which cast is which, or who produced what. Proposed explanations for the dispute include rivalry between the British captors and Napoleon's French circle, the possibility of financial gain, and the pursuit of fame. A separate controversy surrounds a post-mortem cast of Napoleon's right hand, allegedly made by Antommarchi. His servant Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis wrote in his memoirs that no one present at Saint Helena had thought to cast Napoleon's hands, directly contradicting the attribution.

  Today copies of the death mask can be found at institutions including the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, the Museo Napoleónico de La Habana in Cuba, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Musée de l'Armée in Paris, and the St. Louis Mercantile Library.

• 5. The Atlas and the Lawsuit

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  After returning from Saint Helena, Antommarchi completed the publication Mascagni had left unfinished. He had taken three copies of Mascagni's plates with him to the island and brought them back. In 1823 the finished work appeared in Paris under the title "Planches anatomiques du corps humain exécutées d'après les dimensions naturelles accompagnées d'un texte explicatif," continuing through 1826. The plates were drawn, and possibly engraved, by an artist named Antoine Seratoni.

  Publishing under his own name a work built on a dead man's manuscripts brought predictable legal trouble. The heirs of Mascagni disputed Antommarchi's rights to the plates. That lawsuit was never resolved.

  Antommarchi also wrote about Napoleon directly. He published The Last Moments of Napoleon, in which he concluded that the emperor died of stomach cancer. His diary of Napoleon's medical care became the basis for additional books published between 1823 and 1826, translated into French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish.

• 6. Poland, Louisiana, Cuba

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  In 1831 Antommarchi traveled to Poland, where he became general inspector of Polish hospitals during the November Uprising, a revolt against Russian rule. When Russian forces suppressed the uprising, he fled to Paris.

  From Paris he crossed the Atlantic to Louisiana. In 1834 he donated a bronze death mask of Napoleon to the people of New Orleans. He then spent a period in Veracruz, Mexico, working as an itinerant physician, before the source places him there specifically between June and July of 1837.

  What drew him to Cuba was family. He was looking for his cousin, Antonio Juan Benjamin Antommarchi, who had built a fortune through coffee plantations on the island. Antommarchi settled in Santiago de Cuba, practiced medicine, and privately taught anatomy and sculpting. He also became skilled at surgery for cataract removal. On the 3rd of April 1838, at the age of 57, Antommarchi died in Cuba of yellow fever. His name appears in the literature in at least five variants across French, Italian, Spanish, and English, a sign of how far his life had taken him from the Corsican village of Morsiglia where it began.