Plunder: Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast
Cynthia Saltzman
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 16, 2021)
ISBN-13: 978-0374219031
A captivating in-depth study of Napoleon's plundering of Europe's art and how it legitimized the Louvre.
Vast and sublime, more than twenty-two feet tall and thirty-two feet wide, and featuring a brilliantly staged, lavishly colored banquet with some hundred and thirty figures, Paolo Veronese’s painting Wedding Feast at Cana was hailed as a masterpiece of High Renaissance art upon its completion in 1563. It hung in the monastery of the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore until French troops, on the order of their twenty-eight-year-old leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, tore it off the wall of the monastery in 1797. Veronese’s masterwork was one of twenty paintings that Napoleon took after his troops marched on Venice. Folded like a rug, the canvas ended up at the Louvre, establishing it as the greatest art museum in the world.
In Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast, the celebrated art historian Cynthia Saltzman tells the story of Napoleon’s art looting and its relationship to the foundation of the Louvre. As Saltzman shows, Napoleon looted art for the French nation he represented; he displayed it in a public museum, which, owing to the plundered masterworks, soon became the toast of Europe. Napoleon’s penchant for looting reflected the best and worst of his character: his desire for greatness―to carry forward the finest parts of civilization―and his ruthlessness in mythologizing himself and seizing power.
Expertly researched, and with rare insight into one of history’s most famous and polarizing individuals, Plunder is a propulsive chronicle of the Napoleonic Wars, art theft, and the controversial origins of the world’s greatest museum.
Author
Cynthia Saltzman is the author of Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece and Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures. A former reporter for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, she is the recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and has degrees in art history from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
More info:
https://artdaily.com/news/132861/Thames---Hudson-is-to-publish--Napoleon-s-Plunder--The-Theft-of-Veronese-s-Feast--by-Cynthia-Salzman
You go to Verona, you can visit churches, you will see copies with the reference that the original was stolen by Bonaparte.
Review from Publisher's Weekly, Nov. 2, 2020
"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. (May)"