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This monument was initially commissioned to Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini by Elisa Bonaparte in order to decorate the Piazza Grande in Livorno. Completed in 1814, at the time of the fall of the Empire, the statue remained abandoned in the sculptor's workshop during more than half a century.

The monument is made of a colossal statue on a high pedestal. The whole is about 8 metres high and 4 metres wide, in Carrara marble. The monument, modelled on classical antiquity, had originally been ordered to decorate the Piazza Grande in Leghorn in a period when Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon’s sister, was the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. It is the work of the famous Florentine sculptor, Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850). It was finished in 1814, when the Empire fell, and had remained in total neglect in Bartolini’s studio for about half a century. In 1849, one year before he died, the sculptor suggested to give the statue to the city of Bastia. The sale was made with his heirs in 1852. The monument was solemnly inaugurated on June 15th, 1854. Napoleon is represented as Jupiter, the king of the Olympian gods, whose symbolic emblems are the eagle and the big sceptre. This type of iconography was often used by Roman emperors. The bas relief of the pedestal represents the Grand Duchess Elisa, crowned with a diadem and dressed after the antique, standing on a quadriga. The chariot drives along a public building with a peristyle and a triangular fronton. To the right, a bearded character reclining and resting on a dolphin, is holding an antique rudder. It is the allegorical representation of the Mediterranean Sea, that is to say “il mare mediterraneo” (the gender is masculine in Italian).

Bastia

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