Plunder by Cynthia Saltzman

Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast
By Cynthia Saltzman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Napoleon Bonaparte stole Paolo Veronese’s gorgeous painting The Wedding Feast at Cana from the grand Benedictine monastery San Giorgio Maggiore in 1797. He had it carted from its island home in Venice to France, where eventually it would be installed in 1801 in the Louvre, a newly-established art museum that only required pilfered artwork to really set itself up as a world-class institution. 

The theft of The Wedding Feast at Cana was only one of many, many thuggish desecrations committed by Napoleon Bonaparte in his career, which might make it seem an unlikely subject for an entire book, but Cynthia Saltzman has mined a comparatively minor bit of cultural vandalism and produced an absolute gem: Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast tells the story of the theft of the painting, the stir it made when it arrived in France, the personality of the thief, and, most winningly of all, the working life of the painter, who died centuries before Bonaparte got his chubby little hands on the canvas. It’s a lot to cram into 300 pages, but at every moment Saltzman maintains a smooth, easy control over all of it. Plunder is captivating reading, a chronicle full of outsized personalities.

Of course, alas, one of those personalities is Bonaparte himself, and despite his obvious role as the villain of the piece, he’s got a bit of a fan in this author. “Bonaparte revealed a romantic imagination in his writings - well-crafted orders of the day sound like trumpet calls,” Saltzman writes in a flutter of gush, one of a few throughout the book. “Certain proclamations and dispatches recount the campaign with the flourish of epic poetry.” 

Somewhat predictably, a version of that same kind of gushing rippled through even normally cynical Parisians when Veronese’s big painting appeared in their midst. “Next to this painting, all the others, all, without exception, looked painted,” gasped one typically hyperbolic French art fan, sounding like almost every art critic ever hatched. “This one, next to nature, doesn’t appear to have been painted. It is nature fixed and rendered unchanging by an enchantment of figures who have been seized by immobility.”

Such nonsense aside, one thing readers will appreciate vividly when they finish Plunder is just how glorious a viewing experience The Wedding Feast at Cana is. Like anyone with a soft spot for something in the Louvre that isn’t the Mona Lisa, Saltzman can occasionally sound a little bitter about sidelined masterpieces (one sympathizes; there are never any big crowds to wade through in order to view Sir Edwin Landseer’s Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner), but the sheer storytelling passion with which she tells the story of the painting itself, from commission to execution to long and varied afterlife, is the most energetic thing about a very energetic book. Saltzman’s almost religious reverence of great art museums is the perfect backdrop to her appreciation of the painting itself:

The chance to see The Wedding Feast at Cana to some degree in the way Veronese imagined it would be seen in Palladio’s refectory is to encounter it in the evening, when the Louvre is officially closed and emptied of the public it was designed to serve. Then the Grande Galerie reveals itself to be a spectacular corridor illuminated with barrel-vaulted skylights and lined with more than two hundred paintings. As the light fades outside and the room darkens, the Grand Galerie becomes the sort of space that art museums were once intended to be and that most of the Louvre’s galleries still are - secular houses of worship - devoted to the contemplation of paintings and sculpture. 

Lest readers start to think that the Louvre is the last place that should be allowed to keep a looted masterpiece, Saltzman points out that the old Benedictine monastery is now a swanky corporate conference venue with a life-sized reproduction of the Feast to inspire tipsy G7 delegates while the original draws crowds over in France. 

Viewers of both the copy and the original might be stunned by Veronese’s sheer riotous genius, but they’re unlikely to get the full fascinating story of The Wedding Feast at Cana from a sign or a hand-held recorded bit of tour-guide boilerplate. But that full story now has a delightful new telling in this book, although if Saltzman plans a book for every cultural crime Bonaparte committed, we’ll be here some time.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.