G iuseppe P ietro B agetti
Turin 1764 - 1831
26. The Battle on the Slopes of Mount Crètes, 15 May 1800; Napoleon’s army, marching
towards the village of Étroubles, forces the enemy to withdraw
watercolour on paper
500 x 770 mm
Signed lower right: Bagetti
Provenance:
Maresciallo Gouvion-Saint Cyr.
Napoleon called a halt in Étroubles, on his way to Marengo, on 20 May 1800. He was accompanied, and
partly preceded, by an army comprising some thirty-five thousand infantry and artillerymen, and five thousand
horsemen. Napoleon stopped at the hospice at the top of the Great St. Bernard Pass, where he had a brief
exchange with the monks who managed it, before tackling the descent towards Étroubles where he slept in the
house of Abbé Léonard Veysendaz. His arrival was preceded by a battle on the slopes of Mount Crètes, where
General Victor Rohan’s Croats had installed a gunpost, on 15 May 1800. The fear kindled in the hearts of the
local people by the passage of Napoleon’s troops and by the battles that took place in their region is still exorcised
in the ritual of Carnival, the typical local mask being Landzetta, a caricature of a soldier in the Napoleonic army.
The incident in question occurred in the course of Napoleon’s second campaign in Italy. During Napoleon’s
absence on campaign in Egypt, the French had been defeated time and again by the Austrians both in Germany
and in Italy, at the battle of Novi, at Cassano d’Adda and on the Reno. The new coalition against the French
had overthrown the Republic of Naples, which the French had set up in 1799, the Republic of Rome and the
Cisalpine Republic. Napoleon resumed command of the French Army on 6 May 1800, six months after the coup
d’état of 18 Brumaire. Staging a spectacular march, he crossed the Alps at the Great St. Bernard Pass and took
the Austrians quite by surprise, rapidly going on to defeat them at Montebello and then returning to Milan. The
battle of Marengo, the most famous of Napoleon’s battles in Italy and an extremely tough but decisive clash, was
fought on 14 June 1800. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon Napoleon was on the verge of losing, but by 8 o’clock his
triumph was complete.
There exists a second version of the same composition, now in the Musée de Versailles 1 .
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( FC )
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