Battle of Castiglione, Bonaparte and His Staff, Antique Madou Lithograph, 1827

An original antique lithograph from Madou's Vie de Napoléon, published at Brussels in 1827. The sheet is lettered "BATAILLE DE CASTIGLIONE" in open capitals above the image. Bonaparte, seen from behind on a white horse, and his mounted staff, among them a grenadier in a bearskin and officers in plumed hats, have halted on a rise at the center and right, beneath the trees at the right edge. They look out over a wide valley where lines of infantry advance through the smoke of the action toward the hills. In the foreground the dead lie on the ground beside a wooden palisade at the left, with a saber dropped among them.

The caption in script below the image reads: "Le mamelon de médole fut emporté. La cavalerie légère surprit le quartier général, et faillit enlever Wurmser. Partout l'ennemi se mit en retraite." In English: "The hillock of Medole was carried. The light cavalry surprised the headquarters and nearly carried off Wurmser. Everywhere the enemy fell back." No scene number or imprint is lettered on the sheet.

Vie de Napoléon was printed and published at Brussels in 1827 by the Lithographie royale de Jobard, Marcellin Jobard's press. Its title page announces a text compiled by a society of men of letters from the new documents dictated and corrected at Saint Helena by Napoleon himself, illustrated with plates lithographed by Jean-Baptiste Madou (1796 to 1877) after compositions by French painters. The plate belongs to the first volume, whose scenes run from Brienne to the camp of Boulogne.

The battle of Castiglione was fought on 5 August 1796 between Bonaparte's Army of Italy and the Austrian army of Field Marshal Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser, who had come down from the Tyrol to relieve the siege of Mantua. The hillock of Medole, on the southern flank of the Austrian line, was taken by the French, and Wurmser's army withdrew across the Mincio.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.