Napoleon and His Artists (Art & Architecture)

"All great dictators recognize the importance of visual media as propaganda; Lenin was among the first to spot the potential of cinema. Similarly, Napoleon had a keen sense of the way an entire triumphalist imperial culture could be inculcated through great works of art that bore a tendentious or subliminal 'message'. He was always a propagandist of genius, and one proof of this is the subtle way he transmogrified the classical revival of the 1790s--originally intended to transmit republican values of self-sacrifice, Spartan austerity and civic virtue--into a paean to his own achievements."Timothy Wilson-Smith is the author of 'Napoleon and His Artists (Art & Architecture)', published 1998 under ISBN 9780094790506 and ISBN 0094790507.