Napoleon Bonaparte bust statue

Napoleon Bonaparte rose from a minor Corsican gentry family to crown himself Emperor of the French in 1804, redraw the map of Europe through a decade of conquest, codify civil law in the Code Napoléon that still underpins continental legal systems, and end his career on Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. Few historical figures have been more frequently portrayed: from the cool neoclassicism of Antoine-Denis Chaudet's marble busts to the imperial portraiture of Andrea Appiani and Antonio Canova's colossal nude as Mars the Peacemaker. The bust portrait reduces that vast iconography to its most enduring image — the resolute profile of the man who reshaped a continent.