Count Spalletti collection, Rome, 
Private collection.

Celebrated for his portraits of Napoleon and his milieu, Andrea Appiani can be considered the Italian equivalent of Jacques-Louis David and François Gérard. Born to a noble family in Modena, Achille Fontanelli (1775–1838) endorsed the Napoleonic side upon the arrival of the French army in Italy in 1796. He began his military career commanding a division of the Cispadana Legion, leading the repression of the rebellion in Garfagnana and heading an expedition in the papal dominions in the Romagna and the Marches. After the fall of the Republic of Venice, Fontanelli took part in the occupation of the Ionian Islands, leading the conquest of Corfù. Following the surrender of Ancona at the end of 1799 Fontanelli was repatriated to France, where in 1800 he was reassigned to command a light infantry battalion of the Legione Italica and followed Bonaparte in his crossing of the Alps and the Marengo Campaign. He served as an aide-de-camp to Napoleon in 1802, and in 1807 he was placed in command of the Italian Royal Guard under the ultimate command of Eugène de Beauharnais, who became a close friend. Fontanelli distinguished himself in the battle of the Piave, and after the battle of Wagram in 1809, Napoleon appointed him count of the Empire and the Kingdom of Italy and awarded him the Legion of Honor for his distinguished service; from 1811, he served as Minister of the War and of the Royal Navy for the Kingdom of Italy. In 1813, the year in which this portrait was painted, Fontanelli took part in the military campaign in Germany that ended with Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig. After the definitive fall of Napoleon, Fontanelli retired to Modena with his famously beautiful second wife, Lucia Frapolli, the former mistress of the poet Ugo Foscolo. After relocating to Milan in 1831 to avoid local uprisings, Fontanelli died there in 1838.

Two nearly identical versions of this portrait are known; the present one, which is crisper in detail and signed and dated, and a second one, without signature and date, in the collections of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Milan, to which it was donated in 1941 by the Countess Mainoni, a distant descendant of Fontanelli. Both paintings are mentioned in the so-called Carte Reina, the documents collected by Francesco Reina in the years 1818–19 for a projected biography of Andrea Appiani which was never published.1

The present painting is considered the last masterpiece by Appiani as a portrait painter, for on 26 April 1813 Appiani suffered a stroke and was unable to paint for the few remaining years of his life. Chronologically, the portrait is close to the fresco of Parnassus for the ceiling of the Villa Reale in Milan, commissioned in 1811 by Fontanelli’s lifelong friend, Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy (now Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan).2 Both the fresco and the present portrait are iconic of the Neoclassical style which flourished in Milan during the Napoleonic era.

1. The portrait is mentioned twice in the Carte Reina, preserved in the Bibliothéque National de France, Fondation Custodia, Paris, Ms. It 1546: on folio 146, the painting is described as “lavoratissimo” [painted in an extremely accurate way], and on folio 193, the work is noted a second time.