If there’s such a thing as a Cubist painting in words, it must be Gertrude Stein’s 1923 poem “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” In it, she draws a strange, playful parallel between her friend Pablo Picasso and Napoleon Bonaparte, a comparison that seems as much a tongue twister as Picasso’s paintings were eye twisters.
The day after visiting the Picasso Museum in Paris, that poem still on my mind, I found myself standing before Napoleon’s tomb in the Dôme des Invalides. Facing the massive sarcophagus of red Shoksha quartzite, I had a fleeting fantasy of a Star Wars–style duel between Picasso and Napoleon. If ambition were the force fueling their lightsabers, which one would win?
Both men possessed immense egos and an obsessive concern with their reputation and legacy. While thinking about them I had a flash of a scene from another movie — Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, where its protagonist, a film director Sandy Bates, responds to a comment during a public Q&A session following one of his movie screenings:
Remark from the audience: A lot of people have accused you of being narcissistic.
Sandy Bates: No, I know. People think that I'm egotistical and narcissistic, but it's not true. I-I uh I... As a matter of fact, if I did identify with a Greek mythological character, it would not be Narcissus.
Question from the audience: Who would it be?
Sandy Bates: Zeus.
The Master Curators of Their Own Narrative
I bet Napoleon felt like Zeus too. He was also notorious for shaping his public image. At the height of his power, he would disguise himself as an ordinary citizen, wandering the streets of Paris to eavesdrop on public opinion. He also manipulated official documents and historical records, meticulously curating his image for posterity.
Picasso was no less careful with his legacy. At the peak of his fame, when his former lover, Fernande Olivier, began publishing a more intimate version of her memoirs in a French magazine, Picasso offered her a generous pension in exchange for her silence. She accepted.
More than anything, these two men seemed determined to author their own immortality, curating the myths that would outlive them.
Beyond the Public Persona
Both men rose from relative obscurity to dizzying heights of fame, each skilled at turning obstacles into opportunities — sometimes to the point of opportunism. Neither was known for loyalty: they could be quick to abandon people who no longer served their purpose.
They were also deeply superstitious. Picasso kept his nail clippings and hair, convinced they contained his “essence,” and forbade any talk of death in his presence. Napoleon, beside other things, had an irrational fear of open doors, insisting that they be shut immediately behind anyone entering his chambers.
And both were relentlessly productive. Napoleon was famous for working 18 to 20 hours a day. Picasso, driven by a similar intensity, created an estimated 50,000 works in his lifetime — averaging nearly three artworks a day. Tireless, versatile, and often tyrannical in their relationships, both men embodied a force of will that blurred the line between genius and obsession.
The Breton Stripes and the Emperor’s Victories
A curious coincidence ties them together sartorially as well. Picasso’s iconic Breton stripe shirt traces back to the French Navy — and its design was originally said to feature 21 horizontal stripes, one for each of Napoleon’s victories over the British.
Whether or not Picasso knew this, it’s hard not to see the symmetry: the painter whose genius fractured perception itself, clad in stripes honoring a general who fractured Europe’s political map.
The Dance Between Destiny and Freedom
Unquestionably, both Napoleon and Picasso forged their own destinies — yet they held conflicting views of fate.
Picasso, on one hand, carried a near-mystical conviction in his own supernatural abilities. On the other, he wrestled with feelings of helplessness, haunted by the death of his younger sister Conchita, who died from diphtheria at just seven. That loss left him torn between believing in personal power and fearing forces beyond his control.
Napoleon, by contrast, placed unwavering faith in his “lucky star” and divine favor. And yet, paradoxically, at his coronation in 1804, he famously seized the crown from Pope Pius VII’s hands and placed it on his own head — a defiant gesture proclaiming that his authority came from himself alone.
It’s also ironic that he died exiled on a remote island, stripped of his empire, only for his remains to be returned years later to rest beneath this grand sarcophagus before me — more pompous than any king’s. A burial perfectly matched to his towering ambition.
Before my trip to France, I dreamed of Napoleon crossing the Alps, likely influenced by the famous painting. But in my dream, he appeared as a centaur. When I woke, I scribbled this down:
I had a dream of a centaur,
Galloping through snow.
Around him—
Eerie, ethereal glow.
Half man, half horse,
A sheer force,
Like fate that rides us all.
The poem lands on a seemingly deterministic note, but it left me wondering: Is a “lucky star” real, or are destiny and fate merely stories we invent as we go?
Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. As writer Sam Keen put it:
“My life, and yours, is a dance between destiny and freedom.”
Picasso and Napoleon are hardly role models, but one can’t deny that they danced — half chance, half will, half myth, half man — and in doing so became centaurs of history.
🖤
— Vibe & Verse
From page to thread — a story you can wear
Napoleon Centaur $64.99