Plunder: Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast

Today’s Nonfiction post is on Plunder: Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast by Cynthia Saltzman. It is 317 pages including notes and it is published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The cover is a picture of the stolen painting. There is mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. The intended reader is someone who is interested in art history and Napoleon. There Be Spoilers Ahead. 

From the dust jacket- A captivating study 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. 

Review- A wonderful and engaging book about art history and Napoleon’s greed for power. Art always has had power, power to change minds, power to inspire devotion or hatred, to show who has power and who doesn’t and Napoleon understood that. When he was still a general for the French Republic, he was tasked to bring back to Paris the old masters of art, and he did just that at any cost. I have not read much about Napoleon but after this book I am more interested in learning about him and his wars. Saltzman has done great research and her notes are very good, if you wish to study further. She is also an engaging writer who knows how to explain her subject to someone who knows very little about him or the individual art pieces in this book. I would recommend this book. 

I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.