Percier and Fontaine dressed Napoleon’s empire in Rome
Empire style is early-nineteenth-century Neoclassicism’s second phase across architecture, furniture, and decoration, named for Napoleon I’s First French Empire. It traded Directoire’s austere Republican Rome for Imperial Rome’s florid Corinthian splendour. Architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, Rome-trained, became its chief inventors.
The style flourished roughly between 1799 and 1815. Its predecessor, the Directoire, had cast Republican Rome’s stoic virtue as a model for both art and politics, and a short-lived Consulate style bridged the two by borrowing motifs from military campaigns, Egypt among them.
After studying in Rome, Percier and Fontaine led 1790s Paris furniture design and won commissions from Napoleon and statesmen; as architects of Malmaison they popularised Greek and Roman trophies. Pieces were simple timber boxes veneered in costly colonial mahogany and trimmed with finely worked ormolu, gilded bronze mounts. Ornament obeyed a strict left-right symmetry reminiscent of Louis XIV. Rooms were spacious, with Corinthian pilasters, a frieze along the top of the walls, pale ornamented ceilings and panels of painting, stucco or embroidered silk; a brocaded silk panel woven in Lyon in 1808 by Lacostat et Trollier once lined a salon at the Palais de Meudon. Paris monuments—the Arc de Triomphe, Carrousel arch, Vendôme column, La Madeleine—broadcast the look.
Bernadotte carried Napoleonic taste to Sweden as the Karl Johan style, durable in Scandinavia after French fashion moved on. France revived it in the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth and again in the 1980s. Unified Italy after 1870 reused it as a national Roman idiom that Mario Praz called the Italian Empire, while Britain, Germany and the United States bent it into Regency, Biedermeier, Greek Revival and late-Federal variants. Soviet “Stalinist Empire” later exported bombastic cousins across the Eastern bloc.
The style’s politics are blunt: furniture and façades were meant to idealise imperial power. Strip the eagles and you still feel the Corinthian swagger that replaced Doric restraint.
Source: Empire style
