Napoleons Plunder and the Theft of Veroneses Feast

Cynthia Saltzman

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780500776544
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Napoleons Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history and, in doing so, sheds new light on the complex origins of what was once called the Musée Napoléon, now known as the Louvre. In 1796, four years after the founding of the First French Republic and only two days after his marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte left Paris to take command of his first campaign in Italy, aged only twenty-six. One year later, Napoleons army was in Venice and his commissioners were determining which great Renaissance artworks to bring back to France. Among the paintings the French chose was The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese, a vast masterpiece that had hung in the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore since it was painted in 1563. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean packed among paintings commandeered from Venice and made its way by river and canal to Paris where Napoleon gathered his spoils of war treasures from the cities of Rome, Milan, and later Berlin and Vienna. In 1801 the Veronese was placed on triumphant display in the Louvre, the former palace of the French kings, which had been transformed into a public museum that ostensibly belonged to the French people, but which also functioned as a monument to Napoleons power. Saltzman interweaves the stories of Napoleons military campaigns, uncovering the treaties through which he obtained his loot, with the histories of the plundered works themselves, exploring how these masterpieces came into being. As much as a story of military might, this is an account of one of the most ambitious cultural projects ever conducted.

1

“Send me a list of the pictures, statues, cabinets and curiosities”

Jealous of all glory, [Bonaparte] wanted to surround himself with the brilliance of the arts and sciences.

—Duchess of Abrantès

Almost from the start of the 1796 French campaign against the Austrians in Italy, art was on Napoleon Bonaparte’s mind.

“Above all, send me a list of the pictures, statues, cabinets and curiosities at Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Modena and Bologna,” he demanded on May 1 in a letter to Guillaume Faipoult, the French envoy in Genoa. The cities he named were famous for their paintings—stockpiles built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by some of the most extravagant patrons of Renaissance art—the Viscontis, the Sforzas, the Farneses, the Estes, and the popes.

Bonaparte was aiming for collections of the highest quality—art that he imagined would enhance the prestige of the new museum in Paris at the Louvre. The Louvre had opened as the Musée Français only three years before, on August 10, 1793, during the Terror, when France’s most celebrated painter, Jacques-Louis David, and the Committee of Public Safety transformed the palace of the Bourbons into a public gallery of art, granting French citizens access to the royal collections of antiquities, paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts that now, in theory, were theirs.

At that point, Bonaparte was in Turin, still far from the places he hoped to plunder. But he was advancing east. He had been in Italy only a month. Earlier, on March 2, in Paris, he had officially taken command of France’s Army of Italy. A week later, he married Josephine de Beauharnais. Within two days, he had left for Nice, where he met the French troops.

As commander of the Army of Italy, Bonaparte was charged with driving the Austrians from the Duchy of Milan, which covered most of Lombardy and had been ruled by the Habsburgs for nearly a century. France was also fighting Austria in the Rhineland, so the Directory had dismissed Italy as the less important of the two fronts. At best, they hoped Bonaparte (with some forty-nine thousand troops) would divert Austria’s allied forces (of some eighty thousand) away from the fighting in the north.

Bonaparte had come to the Italian campaign well prepared. The previous year he had worked at the Topographical Department of the Committee of Public Safety, the war ministry’s strategic planning office in Paris, formulating the offensive to defeat the Austrians in Italy. He had articulated these agendas to the war minister Louis-Gustave Doulcet de Pontécoulant, who recalled how they “gushed out of him like a volcano sends up the lava it has held back.”

To reach the Austrians in Milan, Bonaparte had first to dispense with Piedmont-Sardinia, a kingdom in the northwest of Italy that was ruled by the vacillating Austrian ally Victor Amadeus III. Bonaparte also had to contend with other Italian states—the Duchies of Parma, Modena, and Tuscany; the Republics of Genoa and Venice; and the Papal States—a collection of provinces that covered much of northern and central Italy.

Bonaparte won his first victory against the Austrians on April 12, at Montenotte, a village on the steep slopes of the Apennines, twelve miles from the Ligurian Sea. “Everything tells us that today and tomorrow will leave their marks on history,” Bonaparte assured General André Masséna the night before the battle.

From the start, the French army had progressed at a fast pace. “We do not march, we fly,” wrote one of the officers. With this sudden acceleration, Bonaparte imposed his method of warfare on what had been a slow-moving, undecided four-year campaign.

France’s war with Austria was a conflict set off by the Revolution, and the response of Europe’s monarchs to the fate of the French king. On June 20, 1791, Louis XVI had fled Paris with Marie-Antoinette and their children, hoping to reach Vienna and take refuge with the queen’s brother, the Austrian emperor Leopold II. At Varennes, close to the border of the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium), the king was caught, arrested, and taken back to the French capital. He continued to reside in the Tuileries Palace, under effective house arrest. In August, Emperor Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia warned (in the Declaration of Pillnitz) that the French king’s situation was of “common interest” to the European monarchs. Stirred up by fears that the Austrians now threatened France’s constitutional monarchy, the Legislative Assembly and Louis XVI (who secretly hoped France would lose) launched the war against Austria in April 1792.

Four months later, on August 10, in Paris, armed political militants stormed the Tuileries and massacred some six hundred Swiss Guards. That day, Louis XVI was taken prisoner and the French monarchy collapsed. Bonaparte, then an artillery captain of twenty-two, happened to be in Paris and “ventured into” the Tuileries Gardens. “Never since has any of my battlefields struck me by the number of dead bodies as did the mass of the Swiss,” he would recall. In December, France’s newly elected National Convention, which had established a republic, put Louis XVI on trial for treason, found him guilty, and voted to condemn him to death.

On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was taken by carriage to the Place de la Révolution, formerly the Place Louis XV (and later the Place de la Concorde), where he was guillotined. An artist ran off an edition of prints that shows the executioner holding the king’s head above the crowd.

The French king’s execution that January only raised the stakes for the Austrian emperor and the Prussian king, who soon added allies—Britain, Spain, the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, Piedmont, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies—to build the First Coalition against the French. Already, in November 1792, the National Convention had voted to take the Revolution abroad, by assisting all peoples seeking to “recover their liberty.” In August 1793, a French levée en masse, or conscription, aimed to raise an army of three hundred thousand men.

Bonaparte envisioned that he would quickly defeat the Austrians in northern Italy, and advance toward Vienna. “I march tomorrow against Beaulieu,” he told the Directory on April 28, referring to the Austrian general Jean-Pierre de Beaulieu. “I will oblige him to cross the Po, I will pass it immediately after him, I will take all of Lombardy, and, in less than a month, I hope to be in the mountains of the Tyrol, to find the Army of the Rhine, and with it carry the war into Bavaria.” The directors had mentioned nothing about heading to Austria, but only weeks after taking charge, Bonaparte alerted them to what he intended to do, whether they approved or not.

In Italy, the Directory would soon give Bonaparte another charge—to plunder it. “The resources which you will procure are to be dispatched towards France,” they wrote on May 16, 1796. “Leave nothing in Italy which our political situation will permit you to carry away, and which may be useful to us.” The French Republic needed funds, and its Army of Italy required equipment. “Everything is lacking and especially transport,” Cristoforo Saliceti, the French government’s commissioner, had written to Lazare Carnot, a director in charge of the military, in February from Nice. “No preparations have been made to enter on campaign.” The commanders “say they cannot march because they need mules and supplies, either in fodder, for the transport and the cavalry, or medical supplies.” Saliceti then proposed that the army exploit the resources they found in Italy: “Would it not be more useful and more correct to procure them [supplies] from the enemy, to attack in providing for the needs of the moment?”

Bonaparte took no time in turning the army’s situation around. “Misery has led to indiscipline,” he wrote. “And without discipline there can be no victory.” He asked Faipoult to secure a loan of three million francs from bankers in Genoa. With that, Saliceti bought mules, wheat, clothes, and shoes.

After Bonaparte’s victory at Montenotte, others followed within days. On April 13 and 14, at Millesimo and Dego, the French again defeated the Austrians. Austria’s 5,700 casualties from the three battles were more than triple the 1,500 suffered by France. Within a week, at Ceva, and then at Mondovì, Bonaparte took on Piedmont and triumphed again. Afterward, he forced Mondovì to provide sixteen thousand rations of meat and eight thousand bottles of wine. From nearby Acqui, he ordered clothing and boots. “Napoleon did nothing drastic strategically or tactically,” argues the historian Steven Englund. “But under his hand the army and its divisional commanders performed the familiar routines of march and countermarch, attack and fallback, feint and envelopment, so well and so swiftly that they struck with the force of the new.”

On April 23, the Piedmont commander requested a cease-fire. Napoleon brushed him off: fighting would continue until he handed over three forts—Coni, Tortona, and Alexandria—to the French. Within five days, the Piedmont king had agreed. On April 28, in Cherasco, some thirty miles south of Turin, Bonaparte signed an armistice.

Bonaparte was “always cold, polished and laconic,” wrote Joseph-Henri Costa de Beauregard, who negotiated the peace terms for Piedmont. Afterward, they had supper. Bonaparte “rested his elbows upon the balcony of a window to watch the day break,” recalled Beauregard. They had talked for over an hour. “The intellect was dazzled by the superiority of his talents, but the heart remained oppressed.”

Few had ever encountered the rapid-fire pace set by Bonaparte, who did many things at once. In the first nine days of the offensive, he sent off fifty-four letters to his generals. On April 20, he wrote six letters, and after midnight, three more. This barrage of words continued, and by the end of the year he would send some eight hundred pieces of correspondence—letters and dispatches.

That spring in Italy, the French army’s early momentum never slackened. On April 30, the French started in Acqui, not far from Genoa; on June 3, they would arrive in Verona—150 miles to the east. Later, before the battle of Castiglione, General Pierre-François Augereau would drive his troops 50 miles in 36 hours, or at close to twice the average speed of the enemy. Bonaparte himself was always on the move. In one three-day period, he ran his horses at a pace that left five dead.

On May 6, Bonaparte had asked the Directory to send him “three or four known artists to choose what is fitting to take to send to Paris.” The Directory had been thinking along the same lines. The day after Bonaparte wrote, but before receiving his letter, Lazare Carnot and two other directors, Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux and Étienne-François Letourneur, “invited” him to appoint “one or several artists to research, collect, and ship to Paris the objects of this sort that are the most precious.”

They repeated the revolutionary theme that the French Republic was the rightful heir to genius: “The Executive Directory is convinced, Citizen General, that you see the glory of the Fine Arts as attached to that of the army you command. Italy owes to them [the Fine Arts] a great part of its riches and its fame; but the time has come when their reign must pass to France to solidify and embellish that of liberty.”

The directors emphasized that the purpose of Napoleon’s art appropriations in Italy was to strengthen the contents of the new gallery at the Louvre: “The National Museum should hold the most famous monuments of all the arts, and you will not neglect enriching it with those pieces for which it waits from the present conquests of the Army of Italy and those that are still to come.”

In their orders to plunder, the directors followed a policy carried out in the Austrian Netherlands under Maximilien Robespierre and the Terror. On June 26, 1794, after the French had defeated the Austrians at Fleurus, they emptied the cathedral in Antwerp of its altarpieces by Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent from the Cross and The Raising of the Cross, and hauled them by cart, along with cannons and other artillery, back to Paris. On September 23, some of the 150 pictures chosen in the Austrian Netherlands arrived in the French capital. Five days later, the Rubens paintings went on view at the Louvre. The French justified these thefts less as a consequence of victory than as the right of the new republic—as acts of liberation, not plunder. On September 24, Luc Barbier, an artist and hussar lieutenant who had accompanied the Belgian pictures to France, spoke to the National Convention, invoking the revolutionary ideology with which the French recast their seizing of art in political terms: “The fruits of genius are the patrimony of liberty. … For too long these masterpieces have been soiled by the gaze of servitude. … The immortal works of Rubens, Van Dyck and the other founders of the Flemish school are no longer on alien soil. … They are today delivered to the home of the arts and of genius, the land of liberty and equality, the French Republic.”

Already, the directors were looking south to Rome, then the unquestioned art capital of Europe. In a letter to Bonaparte dated May 7...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Introduction: “One of the greatest [paintings] ever made with a brush”
• 1 “Send me a list of the pictures, statues, cabinets and curiosities”
• 2 Venice need not “fear that the French Armies would not fully respect its neutrality”
• 3 “Master Paolo will … not spare any expense for the finest ultramarine”
• 4 “He is rich in plans”
• 5 “This museum must demonstrate the nation’s great riches”
• 6 “Draw as much as you can from Venetian territory”
• 7 “The Pope will deliver … one hundred paintings, busts, vases or statues”
• 8 “I’m on a path a thousand times more glorious”
• 9 “The Republic of Venice will surrender … twenty paintings”
• 10 “In the Church of St. George … The Wedding Feast at Cana”
• Plate Section
• 11 “We … have received from Citizen Pietro Edwards”
• 12 “The most secure way would be to send them on a frigate, with 32 cannons”
• 13 “The seam … will be unstitched”
• 14 “The Revolution … is finished”
• 15 “You enter a gallery—such a gallery. But such a gallery!!!”
• 16 “The transparency of air … place[s] Gros beside Tintoretto and Paul Veronese”
• 17 “This beautiful work reminds us of the picture by Paul Veronese”
• 18 “I succeeded … in packing most of the pieces of small size and great value”
• 19 “The only thing to do is to burn them!”
• 20 “This foreboding painting … seems to summon the eye … from all directions”
• 21 “The masterpieces of the arts now belong to us”
• 22 “We are at last beginning to drag forth from this great cavern of stolen goods the precious objects of Art”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• Copyright