The First Italian Campaign as seen by the artists of the Dépôt de la Guerre

Copyright © 1999 by Francesco Frasca

The collection 'des tableaux du ministre de la Défense' conserved at the Service historique de l'armée de Terre consists of a large number of water-colours, gouaches, and drawings of battlefields of the ancien régime, the Revolution and of the Empire. 

The artists belong to a little known group that was nevertheless not unimportant because it provided military reconnaissance until the invention of photography.  In point of fact their functions anticipated those of photographic reconnaissance and I must say that the results that they obtained with their painting techniques go far beyond the cold reproduction of the mechanical instrument.

Van der Meulen, who accompanied Louis XIV on his campaigns in Flanders as peintre ordinaire de l'histoire du Roy, started a tradition that was to last for over two-hundred years.  The figure of the painter officer emerged in France in 1744.  He was part of the corps of geographical engineers, of the Dépôt de la Guerre and his task was to collect topographical data for the War Ministry and its General Staff.  Later on, in 1769, a special corps was set up which was added to that of the 'geographical engineers'. 

Under Louis XV, talented artists excelled in this field.  For example, Charles Parrocel, who painted the battles of Fontenoy, Lawfeld and Ypres;  Cozette, Lenfant, Jean-Baptiste Martin, Le Paon, who amongst other things, painted the battles of Nordlingen and Rocroy;  Louis Nicolas Van Blarenberche, who painted pictures of the battles of Amfelt and Fontenoy;  Louis Boze, who was appointed peintre breveté de la guerre in 1786 by Louis XVI and who was portrait painter of the royal family and then of the new men like Marat, Mirabeau, Lafayette and of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was accompanied by Berthier to the battle of Marengo, which painting was made in co-operation with R. Lefèvre and Carle Vernet.

During the French Revolution the Committee of Public Safety passed the Decree of 12 Ventôse of Year III (3 March 1795) which gave the military painters new status at the topographical department of the Dépôt de la Guerre.  The first fatal casualty was the artiste dessinateur et peintre de batailles Jules Ducreux, who was killed at Jemmampes in 1792 whilst assisting the historiographer Berthier in his duties with the Army of the North.

The war against the European Coalition gave a new impulse to the work of the painters who followed the French armies.  Thus, in 1796, it was Bonaparte who started what was to become one of the finest collections at the Dépôt de la Guerre in order to have a permanent record of his time in Italy.  He was well aware that the Italian campaign was a political launching pad and wanted to acquaint the public with his victories by means of pictorial representations.

One of the most important artists of these works was the Piedmontese Pietro Giuseppe Bagetti (1764-1831), who was a professor of drawing and fortification at the Royal Academy of Turin in 1792, and who entered into the service of the armée d'Italie after the French occupation of Piedmont in 1798, with instructions to portray the sites of the most important battles.  He was then sent to the topographical office of the armée de Réserve as a geographic engineer and was the author of a series of drawings that so impressed Bonaparte that in 1800 he ordered a series of water-colours and gouaches based on Bagetti's battlefield sketches.