AARON WILE: 
What fascinates me about this painting is that it offers a distinctly modern vision of political authority. I'm Aaron Wile, Associate Curator in the Department of French Paintings.  

NARRATOR: 
Jacques-Louis David here portrays Emperor Napoleon in his study with his signature pose, hand in waistcoat.

AARON WILE: 
The clock tells us it's 4:13 in the morning, and we see that he's been working all night. The candles are nearly melted down, his hair is disheveled, his cuffs are unbuttoned. We can see from the large rolled-up piece of paper on his desk that he's been working on his most famous legislative achievement, the Napoleonic Code, which gave post-revolutionary France its first coherent set of laws. David shows Napoleon, just as he's risen from his work, and he's about to gird his sword and leave to review his troops. 

NARRATOR:
A famous book beneath the desk chronicles the achievements of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. 

AARON WILE: 
And this sent a clear message that Napoleon’s achievements equaled or surpassed those of Greece and Rome.  

The portrait, with its almost hallucinatory realism, every detail, every texture is painstakingly rendered, strikes us with the force of truth - it feels like a documentary record, but in fact it's a fiction, it’s a lie. Several distinct moments and objects in his broader history are collapsed into this single image. And in this way, the painting’s participating actively in mythmaking. And I think it's up to us to look more closely to understand how myths are constructed and how political legitimacy of someone like Napoleon is maintained.