Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker by Antonio Canova

Thinking Through Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”

Canova’s Napoleon as Mars attempts to cast the emperor as god of war transfigured into a cosmic harmonizer. But Heidegger would see this sculpture not as failed divinization, but as a moment of ontological tension, where modern man tries to enter mythic Being—and fails gloriously.

Napoleon’s body is idealized—nude, muscular, proportioned. The spear and orb signal martial and terrestrial dominion. But the head betrays this project: it is not mythic. It is political, modern, specific. Heidegger would notice the rift: a body from antiquity, a face from modern contingency. The sculpture tries to set a world into place—but the earth resists.

The marble shines with perfection, yet truth withdraws. This is not a Greek god; it is a man in borrowed eternity. The strife here is epochal: the Enlightenment’s dream of total mastery frays against the material grounding of finitude. The sculpture wants to preserve a world that no longer exists.

Heidegger would not judge it as failure. He would see it as a wound of modernity, where art tries to hold open a world that has already begun to collapse. In that, it reveals the truth of its time.