NAPOLEON'S PLUNDER AND THE THEFT OF VERONESE'S FEAST

A Thames & Hudson first edition with 46 illustrations, 14 in colour, chronicling one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history. Napoleon Bonaparte brought the Bayeux Tapestry to the Louvre Museum in France to whip up further for the proposed invasion of England. In 1796, four years after the founding of the First French Republic and only two days after his marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais, Bonaparte left Paris to take command of his first campaign in Italy, aged only 26. One year later his 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 down 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 what was once called the Musée Napoleon, now known as 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 Napoleon's power. Cynthia Saltzman interweaves the stories of Napoleon's military campaigns, uncovering the treatise through which he obtained his loot, with the histories of the plundered artworks themselves. 300pp, colour.