Cynthia Saltzman

Plunder (eBook, ePUB)

Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A captivating tale of Napoleon's audacious art theft and the creation of the Louvre museum.

Plunder recounts the dramatic fate of Paolo Veronese's Renaissance masterpiece, Wedding Feast at Cana. In 1797, under Napoleon Bonaparte's command, French forces tore this sublime canvas from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Veronese's painting, filled with 130 figures and lavish color, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece upon its creation in 1563.

Rolled on a cylinder, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean alongside other artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome, triumphantly arriving in Paris. By 1801, the Veronese masterpiece was on display at the Louvre, the newly founded public art museum in the former palace of the French kings.

As Cynthia Saltzman weaves the larger story of Napoleon's looting of Italian art and its role in establishing 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 achieving his goals. Despite the efforts of the Duke of Wellington and the Allies to repatriate many of the Louvre's plundered works after Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa.

Meticulously researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of history's most spectacular art appropriation campaigns, shedding light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the world's greatest museums.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in D ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Mai 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780374710392
• Artikelnr.: 59416212

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

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"
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
Index