Description
Book SynopsisOne of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May
A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two. Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal
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 Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of a young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563, the Renaissance picture had been immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had spread the scene across the end wall of the monastery's refectory and filled it with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the ca
