Inside the Napoleon exhibit: Art, power, and the image of an empire

Walk into the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary and the first thing you see is a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte painted in the 20th century by artist Loren Chabot. He stands regal and authoritative in military dress, hand-in-waistcoat, looking every inch the mythical figure—the image Napoleon wanted the world to see.

Next to it sits a plaster death mask, cast in 1821 by Dr. Francesco Antommarchi, the general's physician, moments after Napoleon died on the island of St. Helena. It's a study in mortality and the end of an era.

"It's about life and death and then everything in between," says Marina Fischer, curator of numismatics for the Nickle Galleries. "It's really about the authority that he amassed, that he represented, and how he wanted to be seen."

The exhibition, Napoleon: Art, Money and War, runs until September 19 and tells a story that moves beyond battlefield victories. It is, at its core, a meditation on how power is built and maintained through symbols—not through swords alone, but through the careful orchestration of image.

Fischer oversees Canada's largest academic numismatic collection: 23,000 coins, paper money, tokens, and medals. The collection was founded in the 1960s when the Nickle family donated 10,000 ancient coins to the university. Money—how it moves, what it represents, who controls its image—sits at the heart of this exhibition.

Roughly two-thirds of the show's artifacts are on loan from an unnamed Edmonton-based collector who has spent 40 years assembling Napoleon-related pieces. That includes the rare death mask. After Napoleon's death in 1821, Antommarchi made the cast but didn't release masks to market until 1833, when a handful were distributed in plaster and copper. The one on display was quickly claimed by a noble Belgian family, who passed it down through generations before it was sold in Germany 155 years later.

"When the owner was working in Germany in his 20s, he saw an ad in the paper that they were selling this mask," Fischer says. "They didn't really have a purpose for it, and they wanted to pass it on."

It's a thread of history—one object, many hands, many stories.

Also on display is a broken sword from a British Heavy Cavalry trooper, believed to be a relic from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, which ended the Napoleonic Wars. But the sword is just one artifact in a much larger narrative.

Most of the exhibition focuses on something subtler than weapons: the image Napoleon created and weaponized. During his 1804-1814 reign, Napoleon reshaped Europe through military conquest, but he also maintained power through art, coins, medals, prints, and visual symbols that presented him as victorious, ageless, and stabilizing.

"Wars are not always won on the battlefield," Fischer explains. "They are actually won through art and coins, medals, prints and all types of currencies that are issued. Napoleon was truly a master of doing that."

Many pieces in the collection propagated this heroic image—the victorious general, the reformer, the strongman. But the exhibition doesn't shy away from how that image fractured. During his first exile in 1814 on the Mediterranean island of Elba, he escaped with help from loyal soldiers. When he was sent to the heavily guarded island of St. Helena, where he spent his final years, he still commanded thousands of supporters.

His opponents understood the power of image, too. Satirical prints depict him throwing tantrums or as dangerously incompetent. One print shows a woman—a personification of liberty and justice—using a torch to remove Napoleon's face and reveal the monster beneath.

"It's really erasure," Fischer says. "It's erasure from memory. We see this going all the way back to ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome. This concept of gouging the eyes, removing the eyes, obliterating the eyes: it's symbolic murder."

The promotional image for the exhibition itself is a coin struck in Napoleon's final year of rule, then altered by his opponents after his defeat. They stamped a caged tiger on his head and blacked out his eyes. Image warfare, rendered in metal.

But the erasure didn't stick. After his death, Napoleon's reputation didn't fade—it transformed. Instead of the hand-in-waistcoat pose of power, later depictions showed him with arms crossed, a small ivory figurine on display here capturing that shift.

"It's not a sign of weakness," Fischer says. "It's a symbol that he has so much that he wants to accomplish, but his hands are tied."

Very shortly after his death, Napoleon became a symbol of French national identity—not a threat to be erased, but a cultural icon to be revered. The exhibition includes artifacts and works of art showing this apotheosis, this transformation from living enemy to legendary ancestor.

Even modern Canada carries Napoleon's imprint, though most people don't realize it. The founding of central banking, the trust in currency, the protection of private property—these legal and financial frameworks trace back to Napoleon's Napoleonic Code, his civic reforms, his decision to establish national banks.

"The way we bank today is really due to the Napoleonic laws," Fischer says. "He established those national banks. This is all his civic code."

It's a hidden legacy. Napoleon shaped not just European politics but the modern financial and legal systems that Canadians live within every day—systems so embedded in everyday life that few people trace them back to an emperor who died two centuries ago on a remote island.

The exhibition runs through September 19. During summer months, the gallery is open weekdays only, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It's a show for history buffs, art lovers, and anyone curious about how power is built, projected, and remembered—and how the image we leave behind can outlast empires.