khyungbird ([info]khyungbird) wrote,
@ 2008-02-22 20:25:00
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Useless Thoughts on Napoleon
Man, most portraits of Napoleon show him as some short, fat, wide-faced old guy (and in fact, he still ranks high among "Most Boring Famous People of the Past" in my mind), but if portrait painters are to be believed, at age 32 he was relatively bishi.

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[info]tinpan
2008-02-23 05:55 am UTC (link)
How could he possibly be ranked as a boring person? Commoner rises to Emperor and sets Europe peeing in its collective pants. Helps inspire revolution and the notion of human rights and the downfall of monarchism from Russia to South America. Popularizes canned food. Hires some really good portrait artists.

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[info]ndgmtlcd
2008-02-23 06:35 am UTC (link)
Apparently he was deathly boring at parties. The only song he could sing was "Malbrouk s'en va-t-en guerre" and when he was seated at a dinner table he was zero at making small talk. He would eat his food as fast as possible (he called it efficiency) and then he'd be impatient at all the lingering.

There are other paintings of him in his long-haired "revolutionary general" days. Here are two interesting ones by Andrea Appiani form when he was 28 and a general in Italy. The second one is the best. Scroll down near the bottom of the long page for it.

http://www.napoleonexhibit.com/item.php?id=5
http://www.all-art.org/history356-2.html

But I can't find the one where he looks even more bishounen, and which I remember well.

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[info]arcana_j
2008-02-23 08:12 am UTC (link)
Bishi Bonaparte? No. But General Louis-Charles-Antoine Desaix De Veygoux? Hubba hubba!

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[info]khyungbird
2008-02-23 06:37 am UTC (link)
Napoleon isn't *actually* boring, but when I was a kid, he was such a stereotypical "classical famous person that you are supposed to know about" that my eyes rolled up whenever I saw him mentioned... usually in New Yorker cartoons from the '30s to the '50s where some person in an insane asylum thinks they're Napoleon, as the cliché goes. I used to feel the same way about Alexander the Great, but once I started researching that time period I got a lot more interested in him (plus there is the whole Alexander~potentially bisexual/gay aspect, if you want to go there). I'm working on a story set in France now, so I will have to learn the basics of Napoleon soon enough...!

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[info]greenapple2004
2008-02-23 07:28 am UTC (link)
Napoleon makes some interesting cameo appearances in a current favorite fantasy series of mine--"His Majesty's Dragon" and onward (think: Master & Commander, with dragons)--and he strikes quite an imposing figure, if not a perfectly bishonen one. I thought it was hot, at least.

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[info]arcana_j
2008-02-23 08:08 am UTC (link)
Despite popular impression he really wasn't all that short. He was about 5'6" which was, for the time, a pretty good hight.

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[info]soggytoast
2008-02-23 05:59 pm UTC (link)
I'm 5'8". I could take him.

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[info]shaenon
2008-02-23 06:08 pm UTC (link)

Dude, he looks eerily like you in that painting. With the sideburns, even.

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[info]khyungbird
2008-02-23 06:14 pm UTC (link)
The obvious corrolary of which is, I hope I don't look like Old Napoleon when I'm that age. :/

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Napoleon
(Anonymous)
2008-02-24 03:21 pm UTC (link)
...I have a test on Napoleon next week, and we were shown that painting in class LAST WEEK.

Serendipity is at the heart of hilarity. XD

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