The Broader Picture / Images by Tony Scherman / Deranged? Moi?

There are celebrities and then there are icons. Of the latter, there are few more enduring than Napoleon. He beats Elvis, Marilyn and all the other late legends of the 20th century hands down for interest and glamour. Yes, the others were made into art by people such as Andy Warhol (an expert in making himself into an icon). But Napoleon was a true Goliath, whose influence on the shape of Europe, on its legal, educational and transport systems and on its cultural landscape continues two centuries after his death.

But Napoleon was more than just a dynamic general and a great bogeymen [sic]. He also fostered the creation of a new international style, a visual and design language (known as "Empire") which synthesised the shapes and symbols of Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt and electrified intellectuals, artists and artisans as far apart as Madrid and Moscow, London and Budapest. Some are still electrified today.

Napoleon-mania goes in waves, and there's a new one rolling right up. What with the recent discovery of a film script by Stanley Kubrick on the emperor's life - written in 1968 - and another script by Jerome Tonnerre (screenwriter of Le Bossu) in preparation, along with a screening in June this year at the British Film Institute of a new, "definitive: restoration of the epic Napoleon that Abel Gance directed in 1927 (with a revised score by Carl Davis), it seems likely that it won't be long before we once again find ourselves face-to-face with one of history's most complex characters.

But the Canadian-British artist Tony Scherman has been in precisely that position for well over 20 years, as his new book, Chasing Napoleon, reveals. Scherman is, frankly, obsessed with the little man in the tri-cornered hat. The book, illustrating Scherman's recent paintings on the subject, documents his fascination with Napoleon, from his days as a young Corsican upstart through his gradual emergence as Europe's most dreaded military dynamo to his final days as a tragic exile on the island of St Helena.

Rather like Warhol, who presented Mao Tse-Tung, the Queen, Elizabeth Taylor and the rest in bust-length format, so Scherman, too, brings us dramatically close to his subject - by magnifying Napoleon's head so that it fills the entire surface of these large paintings (measuring between one and 2m sq). The effect is remarkable: those eyes, with their judgemental stare fixed upon us, hang like Jovian planets in the great universe of his face. This powerful, if rather repetitive strategy perfectly mirrors the way cult followers or fans place themselves in relation to the object of their fascination: so close that they are dwarfed by their hero or anti-hero, while he or she, correspondingly, is turned into a giant.

Erasing distance in this way is dangerous, of course, since it removes physical context (and, by extension, moral comparison) from the equation. Scherman isn't interested in the accoutrements used by artists like David, Gros, Ingres or Turner - such as rearing white stallions, resplendent thrones, diminutive beach tossed limpets - to provide narrative signifiers addressing the heights and depths of Napoleon's life. Instead, with Scherman, what we get is a deliberate retro treatment of colour palette (dark oily backgrounds) in which the artist's brushstrokes have been whipped into a frenzy through the addition of encaustic (melted wax mixed in with pigment). The resulting battle-scarred surfaces, which have been scorched, pierced and encrusted with wax and paint, are both dynamic and alarming. Little of the planar control demonstrated by the early 19th-century propagandists who painted Napoleon in person is evident here.

Scherman seems both fascinated and horrified by his passion for the emperor, and the explicit pictorial comparisons made later in the book - between figures such as David, perhaps Napoleon's greatest apologist, and Hitler's architect Albert Speer - underline his own concerns about the role of the artist within the magnetic orbit of powerful dictators.

For Coleridge, Napoleon was "the true wonder and danger of our age". Today, of course, we might feel differently. When Valery Giscard d'Estaing came to dinner at 10 Downing Street with Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister deliberately sat him opposite a painting of the Battle of Waterloo in order to cut him down to size. The truth, though, is that while Wellington may have won the battle, it is Napoleon, not the Iron Duke, who continues to occupy our minds.