After 200 years since Napoleon Bonaparte’s death, it is still difficult to determine what his face really looked like.

Portrait of engraver Luigi Calamatta by Ingres, 1828.

Numerous sculptures, paintings and engravings are so diverse that to obtain the best data one is tempted to rely on his death mask. Yet this is equally problematic; the various masks from Napoleon’s deathbed on May 5, 1821, not only diverge in diminutive details but also demonstrate immense anatomical differences.

A recent 3D virtual scanning undertaken by the Museums of France Centre for Research and Restoration of the seven most known casts, included one by Francesco Antommarchi, a

Corsican-Tuscan medical doctor who was appointed by the Bonaparte family to assist Napoleon in his last difficult months.

An engraved version of this replica was destined to become one of the most known litho­graphs of Luigi Calamatta, an artist of Maltese origins.

Catalogue of current exhibition at Les Invalides to mark 200 years since Napoleon’s death, carrying Calamatta’s etched replica of Antommarchi’s imperial death mask on its cover.

Maltese ancestry

The artist was born in Civita­vecchia on June 21, 1801 – 220 years ago this year – to Vincenzo, a port engineer and Fermina

Natale. According to an own biographical manuscript, his grandfather Michele had earlier moved from Malta to Civitavecchia to carry out engineering works in the city’s harbour. Judging from his occupation, Michele must have come from Vittoriosa, where the surname was first recorded in 1641.

Fermina came from a bankrupt family of financiers who had done business with the French Army in Egypt. Luigi’s elder brother, Michelangelo joined Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, while another Calamatta, Paolo, was a grenadier under the Knights and formed part of the Malta Regiment under the French.

A celestial gravure of Napoleon, with added hair to the death mask, marking the 1840 transporting of the imperial remains to Paris Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale De France, Département Des Estampes Et De La Photographie, Paris

Orphaned early in life, Luigi moved in with his uncle Giovanni Antonio Natale, who sent him to study at l’Ospizio di San Michele in Rome. The young lad soon excelled in design under Italian masters Antonio Concioli (1739–1820), Antonio Ricciani (1775/76–1847) and Domenico Marchetti (1780-1844). Among his early works, in 1817 the Maltese descendant produced the engraving of the Madonna with Child, now among 138 designs housed at the civic museum of Civitavecchia.

Neoclassical influences

When Luigi was expelled from college in 1820 for rowdiness, Marchetti offered him shelter; he also procured him commissions such as the engraving of Saint Peter Saved from the Tempest by Ludovico Cigoli.

After sculptor Antonio Canova forbid Calamatta from engraving his creations, the young Luigi etched instead another Venus by Rome-based Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), known for his heroic neo-classicist style, who  valued the artist’s works.

Ardent in his vision for artistic triumph, in 1822, Luigi met French academician Jean Jacques François Taurel (1757-1832) who taught him the techniques of French engraving and offered him commissions. Against Thorvaldsen’s advice, in 1823 Calamatta moved with Taurel to Paris, where he also caught up with his old mate from San Michele, Paolo Mercuri (1804-1884).

The Battle of Bezzecca 1866 in which the seventh voluntary battalion of Garibaldini, to which Calamatta volunteered aged 65, fought the Austrians in Storo in the north of Italy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Mercuri in turn introduced him to the French neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), whom Calamatta had first met in Florence while the maestro was working on The Vow of Louis XIII. Ingres – known for his portraits of Napoleon – esteemed Calamatta’s engraving of The Vow so much that a close relationship persisted; he left him a bequest after his death.

In 1828, the engraver spent months in Germany followed by a long tour of the Netherlands with Taurel. After years of limelight in Paris during which he also won La Croix d’Honneur and the Légion d’Honneur for his creations, in 1829 Calamatta, during a short stay in Italy because of ill health, started to work on La Gioconda, a most incising oeuvre for which he received a golden medal in 1855 at the Parisian Universal Exhibition.

La Gioconda, described as ‘a mission impossible’, which Calamatta etched with precision in 1829. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Nonconforming Calamatta in July 1830 actively embraced the French democrats who dethroned King Charles X; he also participated in the 1848 political movement that placed Napoleon III on the throne as Emperor of France.

In 1831, Luigi was appointed director of an ancient collection of gravures at the Versailles Gallery while consolidating alliances with eminent Parisian residents, such as the Duke of Orleans, historian-statesman François Guizot, the composer Franz Liszt and the romantic novelist known as George Sand, for all of whom he designed memorable lithographs.

Napoleon’s death mask

Autoritratto of Luigi Calamatta as a Garibaldi soldier, 1866.

Following the cult furore after the emperor’s death, Luigi Calamatta produced the Mask of Napoleon in 1834, now at Les Invalides in Paris,  currently forming part of the exhibition marking 200 years since the emperor’s death. The cover of the catalogue of this remarkable expo­sition, open till the end of October, prides Calamatta’s engraving. The artist also etched an accompanying celestial gravure of Napoleon to mark the 1840 transporting of the imperial remains to Paris.

Calamatta visited Florence in 1836, and the following year saw him installed as professor of engraving at the Brussels École royale de gravure, permitting him to shuttle to Paris. Around 1841 he incised Emilie Hawkes’ portrait of Giuseppe Mazzini, with whom for a time he shared republican and anticlerical ideas during encounters in Paris. In 1852 Luigi was admitted to the Florence Academy and five years later to the Artistica Congregazione dei Virtuosi of the Pantheon in Rome.

Garibaldi soldier at 65 years

Old souvenir postcard of the ceremony marking the return of the ashes of Maltese descendant Luigi Calamatta to Civitavecchia in 1885.

After receiving a directorship by Pope Pius IX in 1858, Calamatta was appointed by Giuseppe Longhi to a professorship at the Brera in Milan in 1861, where he socialised with Italian eminent artists, including Giuseppe Verdi. Aged 65, the rebel Calamatta joined the seventh battalion of Garibaldi vo­lunteers in 1866; he fought at the battle in Storo and escorted King Vittorio Emanuele II to Venice.

Luigi Calamatta died in Milan on March 8, 1869. A monument was erected in his honour in Civitavecchia, where his ashes were taken in 1885. His hometown also boasts of the Higher Institute Luigi Calamatta for Industry and Craftsmanship, besides other public memorials.

Besides the collection in Civita­vecchia, Luigi Calamatta’s litho­graphs are also found at the Brussels Bibliothèque Royale, the Uffizi in Florence and the Calcografia Nazionale of Rome.