He was an artist, collector, aesthete—a man born into the lesser nobility who happily mixed with the hoi polloi. A distinguished diplomat, Dominique Vivant Denon (1747–1825) also delighted in producing priapic engravings and a racy novel—Point de Lendemain (No Tomorrow), which luridly explores the illicit pleasures of a one-night stand. Not surprisingly, he was welcomed in the salons of Paris, where he met the painter Jacques-Louis David and the empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon. When Denon learned that Napoleon was assembling a cast of luminaries—biologists, geologists, chemists, architects, artists, botanists and even a composer and a poet—to accompany his […]
