Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Saltzman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book did something I didn’t think could be done: it has given me qualms about my love for the Louvre. I’ve always loathed Napoleon, and knew in general how much looting of art he did for pure self-serving glory, but the details as revealed by Saltzman (former WSJ reporter and author of the excellent The Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece) are specific and appalling.
Saltzman hangs the tale on the hook of Veronese’s massive Wedding at Cana but includes a much wider range of art similarly commandeered by Bonaparte in his conquest of Europe: the four mighty bronze horses from San Marco in Venice; Vatican sculptures of Apollo Belvidere, the Laocoon, and the Belvedere Torso (considered the finest extant examples of classical sculpture at that time); the so-called “liberation” of paintings by Rubens from the country where he painted them, and much more. Basically, these smaller nations, principalities, duchies, et al. were told either they hand over the works selected by Bonaparte’s art-expert cronies, or the Napoleonic forces would destroy them. Or Napoleon would crush them militarily first, then demand specific art works as the price of defeat. The art was gathered, packed, and carted back to Paris to be housed in the Louvre for the glory of France and (more importantly) of Napoleon (the museum was briefly renamed for him at that time). It’s a long, complicated story with a multifarious cast of toadies, henchmen, conflicted experts, and desperate diplomats under the thumb of a tyrant. I lapped it up.
That said, the book suffers a bit from too many threads and too many actors being woven into a sometimes lumpy and hard-to-follow pattern. Historical background skips forward and back, and ranges from Napoleon’s battles, the structure of the Venetian Republic, two different Metternichs, Josephine Beauharnais’s lovers, and of course many artists and works of art in numerous countries. There are a few color photos of some of the artwork discussed, and a number of small black-and-white images that are so murky as to be hardly worth the inclusion. I did enjoy some of the images of the elegantly hand-written “shopping lists”: “One painting by Titian… one painting by Paul Veronese…” Once Saltzman settles into the particular travails of the Veronese wedding feast masterpiece, it becomes a more coherent and compelling tale. Poor wonder that it was: torn (literally) from the wall where it had hung for over 200 years, cut apart, rolled up, unrolled, relined, repaired, rehung several times… and it is still in the Louvre because it simply is too big, too old, and too fragile to travel again. It should be noted that after Napoleon’s downfall, many artworks were repatriated, but a lot of them stayed put and remain in the galleries of the Louvre. When Wellington was through in Spain, it must be said, a lot of Velasquez ended up (and is still) on British walls. This art, it’s a messy business.
The Veronese wedding is now forced to share a room with a picture of a muddy-skinned, smirking woman painted by someone called Leonardo. I hope this book will get a few people to turn and aim their cellphones at the sumptuous feast on the other wall.
A few interesting side notes: Bonaparte was quite excited to commission a painting by an ambitious young painter named Gros, commemorating Bonaparte’s photo-op visit to a plague hospital in Jaffa (now part of Tel Aviv) while en route to Syria. Many French soldiers died of the plague. Napoleon downplayed it, called it “just a fever,” and claimed that only those who were afraid would die of it, so he marched into the hospital, spoke to the suffering living among the corpses, and left again. How, um,inspiring…? His vision, of course, was to create a united Europe, with a single set of laws, a single currency, sharing trade and culture (with him as the head of it all, of course). The one country which was to be excluded was… Britain. Huh. I guess we’ll see how well this idea plays out, over two hundred years later, yes?
View all my reviews
