Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 11, 1993                   TAG: 9311100118
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: EXTRA-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: joel achenbach
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NAPOLEAN HAD THE ART OF POSING WELL IN HAND

A. Whenever you think of Napoleon, you think: short man; kept hand in vest; came up short (hah!) during invasion of Russia; suffered from "Napoleonic complex;" Battle of Waterloo "was his Waterloo."

We can tell you why he kept the hand in the vest: When posing, one always struggles to figure out what to do with one's hands. Ain't it the truth!

Napoleon was a chronic poser. He was always sitting for portraits, or riding into battle with everyone watching him, or standing by some throne, and in these situations it is normal to be very self-conscious about the hands, what the heck to do with the hands.

So why didn't he put his hands in his pants pockets like a regular Joe? Because he wore the kind of dorky pants that came only to the knees and had no pockets. They didn't invent pocketed pants until later in the 1800s. Apparently people didn't have wallets or car keys at that point. (You wonder, how did men, you know, "adjust" themselves back then?)

The fact is, Napoleon probably didn't walk around with his hand in his vest. We think of that pose because it is the one in the famous painting, "Napoleon in His Study," by Jacques Louis "Give Me a Last Name" David, now hanging at The National Gallery in Washington.

Florence Coman, the National Gallery's assistant curator of French painting, offers another possible reason why the Napoleonic hand was inserted into the Napoleonic vest: The painter may have had trouble painting hands.

"Some artists can't do that with any great facility, and somehow do whatever they can to mask their deficiency," she said.

For example, Henri Rousseau, the post-impressionist painter, had trouble with both hands and feet. "He always, when he was painting feet, would show them masked by a lot of grass spears sticking up in front of them," she says.

Hands and feet don't look good in paintings or illustrations-there are too many things happening there, a tangle of veins and bones and knuckled digits, distracting from the simple curvilinear elegance of other body parts. The David portrait of Napoleon may be nothing more than an upscale version of the Mickey Mouse syndrome: Mickey's only got four fingers per hand, because the illustrators couldn't make five look right.

So Napoleon's lucky. Two centuries down the road, people may think he had a fetish about scratching his tummy, but at least they don't go around asking, "Why did Napoleon only have four fingers on each hand?"