"A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a
distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to
explore the connections between the two.” ―Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal
A
captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the
Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from
Venice
Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana,
a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young
Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio
Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the
Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece.
Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on
the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a
biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice.
Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean
rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and
Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went
on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during
the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings.
As
Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and
its role in the creation of 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 getting whatever he
sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington
and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s
plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa.
Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder
chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in
history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the
complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.
