Cynthia Saltzman, “Plunder”

Politics and Prose – May 21, 2021

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.

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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,

Blake Gopnik, one of North America’s leading arts writers, has served as art and design critic at Newsweek, and as chief art critic at the Washington Post and Canada’s Globe and Mail. In 2017, he was a Cullman Center Fellow in residence at the New York Public Library, and in 2015 he held a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University of New York. He has a PhD in art history from Oxford University and is a regular contributor to the New York Times.

See related:

• Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast
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• Glory of arms and art’: Napoleonic plunder and the birth of national museums
• Raiders of the Lost Art – Episode 3: The Monuments Men | History Documentary
• Curating a Fractured Past: The Role of Museums, Maps, Manuscripts, Prints, Rare Books, Photos, Artifacts, Literature & the Arts in Embracing Our Common Humanity on a Finite Planet
• Recovering a Looted Past: “Repatriating” African History – Digitizing Historical Maps, Images & Artifacts to Enhance Global Collaborative Research & Understanding
• United States returns to Cambodia 30 antiquities looted from historic sites | Reuters
• The man who returned his grandfather’s looted art – BBC News
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• Should the British Museum Return Looted Objects?
• ‘Loot:Britain and the Benin Bronzes’ by Barnaby Phillips
• UK university’s return of looted Benin Bronze puts pressure on other institutions
• TVC Breakfast | France Returns 26 Artefacts Looted from Benin Republic
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• Tears, dance as Benin welcomes back looted treasures from France • FRANCE 24 English
• ‘An emotional moment’ as Benin welcomes back looted treasures from France • FRANCE 24 English
• [Excerpt
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• Africa’s looted art | DW Documentary
• Art, Loot and Empire: The Benin Bronzes
• Recovering a Looted Past: “Repatriating” African History – Digitizing Historical Maps, Images & Artifacts to Enhance Global Collaborative Research & Understanding
• Cambridge University college hands back looted cockerel to Nigeria – BBC News
• Cambridge University Returns Looted Benin Bronze Artefact ‘Okukor’ To Nigeria – Channels Television
• Colonial Loot: Britain’s Theft of the Benin Bronzes from Modern-Day Nigeria
• Recovering A Looted Past ~ “Repatriating” African History: Old Artifacts + Technology ~ New Communities + New Narratives in African History
• Thousands Go Looting As South African Law And Order Breaks Down
• Art looted from war zones | DW Documentary
• Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes: Barnaby Phillips
• Colonial Loot: Britain’s Theft of the Benin Bronzes from Modern-Day Nigeria
• Africa’s looted art | DW Documentary
• Art, Loot and Empire: The Benin Bronzes