Napoleonic Dandy

The Island of Corsica is notorious for its ill-tempered Cap Corse aperitifs, its vile figatelli sausage, and Napoleon, who left it as soon as he could. It is not known for art; yet the capital of Ajaccio (pop. 32,000) has a rich remnant of what was once one of Europe's greatest collections. Ajaccio used to think that the thousand paintings in the municipal museum were fakes, but the late Bernard Berenson disproved that judgment in 1959. Now the collection is becoming a focus of European art interest.

While Napoleon was busy collecting countries, his maternal half uncle, a priest named Joseph Fesch, was busy collecting art. Pulling rank (he soon became a cardinal) Fesch acquired Dutch masters, Italian primitives and renaissance greats. Waterloo meant little to Fesch; he simply moved into the Vatican; but after that he had to rely more on his eye. Once in a junk shop he spied a cupboard with a finely painted door, even though one plank was missing. Later, he found the missing section as part of a stool. Today the picture is on view in the Vatican museum--Leonardo da Vinci's St. Jerome.

Fesch once guessed that he owned 30,000 art works. He bequeathed 1,000 of them to a "study museum" in Ajaccio. The museum is still too small to show more than a fourth of the collection at a time, and there is no accurate catalogue for the Botticellis, Bellinis and Lorenzo di Credis that vie for wall space. Nevertheless it is, indirectly, the best thing Napoleon ever did for Corsica.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.