The Salle du Sacre is dominated by one of the largest paintings in the palace: Jacques-Louis David's immense The Consecration of Emperor Napoleon, painted in 1807 and measuring nearly 10 metres wide. It shows the moment in Notre-Dame cathedral on 2 December 1804 when Napoleon, having taken the crown from the pope, placed it on Josephine's head himself — one of history's most calculated acts of self-coronation.
The painting is a copy; the original hangs in the Louvre. But the scale is right, and seeing it in a room at Versailles rather than a gallery wall gives it a different weight. Napoleon was deliberately reaching back past the Revolution to connect his Empire with the monarchical tradition centred here.
The room also contains David's Distribution of the Eagle Standards, showing Napoleon presenting regimental eagles to his marshals. Between the two paintings you get a concentrated dose of First Empire iconography — the visual language of a man who understood exactly what palaces and pictures were for.