Plunder
Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast
-
-
5.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A captivating tale of Napoleon's audacious art theft and the creation of the Louvre museum.
Plunder recounts the dramatic fate of Paolo Veronese's Renaissance masterpiece, Wedding Feast at Cana. In 1797, under Napoleon Bonaparte's command, French forces tore this sublime canvas from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Veronese's painting, filled with 130 figures and lavish color, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece upon its creation in 1563.
Rolled on a cylinder, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean alongside other artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome, triumphantly arriving in Paris. By 1801, the Veronese masterpiece was on display at the Louvre, the newly founded public art museum in the former palace of the French kings.
As Cynthia Saltzman weaves the larger story of Napoleon's looting of Italian art and its role in establishing the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in achieving his goals. Despite the efforts of the Duke of Wellington and the Allies to repatriate many of the Louvre's plundered works after Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa.
Meticulously researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of history's most spectacular art appropriation campaigns, shedding light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the world's greatest museums.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art historian Saltzman (Old Masters, New World) provides a rich account of Napoleon's looting of Italian masterpieces as he battled the Austrian Empire across Italy in the late 18th century. Saltzman focuses on Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese's The Wedding Feast at Cana, a large-format painting depicting the Venetian Republic at the height of its powers, which in Saltzman's view was emblematic of the scale of Napoleon's ambition, both for his military campaigns and the Louvre, where it still hangs. Saltzman unearths fascinating details about the painting, including the contractual terms Veronese agreed to in 1562, his use of "the rarest and most costly blue" to paint the sky above the feast, the way it caught the light in the Benedictine refectory where it hung for two centuries until Napoleon plundered it, and the efforts French archivists undertook to keep it out of Nazi hands during WWII. The author's descriptions of Napoleon's military and diplomatic campaigns don't have the same energy and insight as the book's art history. Still, this is a rewarding look at the legacy of wartime art theft and the turbulent life of an Italian masterpiece.
