Since its completion in 1563, Paolo Veronese’s 32-foot-long painting The Wedding Feast at Cana had been an object of admiration—an image with religious resonance for the monks of Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore who came before it and a picture filled with aesthetic significance for the countless artists it inspired. But by September 1797, it existed in a bizarre in-between state, something more like war booty. That year, Napoleon’s soldiers violently yanked it from the walls of the refectory for which it was made. The painting was then shipped to France.
“Once off the wall of the Benedictine monastery, wrapped around a cylinder and enclosed in a crate, Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana was in limbo,” Cynthia Saltzman writes in her new book, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “It was no longer an object of religious devotion, nor fully a work of art, but temporarily cargo, part of a shipment of goods, in transit.”
