Napoleon on the Nile
posted:
By Michael Kimmelman [from the NYT]
There was a time, a couple of centuries ago, when a proper military invasion, even a losing one, included an army of doctors, engineers, economists, botanists, zoologists, translators and artists who made sense of the place being invaded. Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, militarily, was a notorious failure (he fled in the face of an insurgency), but his team of savants, as they were called, took notes, drew maps, gathered specimens and documented ancient and modern sites. From this they produced, after nearly 30 years, in 23 huge, sublimely illustrated volumes, "Description de l'Égypte," one of the great encyclopedic surveys, a monument of colonialist ambition.
"NAPOLEON ON THE NILE," at the Dahesh Museum, includes, from the "Description," engravings of Egyptian bugs and animals by Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Jules-César Savigny, painstakingly precise views of Karnak by Jean-Baptiste Lepère and Henri-Joseph Redouté, and panoramas of contemporary Egypt. The French savants documented Egyptian ethnic and social types too, a typical European venture at human classification: an odious endeavor in principle, although, as it happened, in the engraved portraits by André Dutertre, a catalog of humane and dignified individuals.
The "Description" conjures up, from an era before photography, not just a remarkable sense of eternal Egypt but also an enlightened imperialist's constructive desire to find order in what is unfamiliar and foreign. Call it an eternal lesson. Through April 29, 580 Madison Avenue, at 56th Street, (212) 759-0606, daheshmuseum.org.
