Cynthia Saltzman - Plunder: Napoleons Theft of Veroneses Feast

This is the story of Napoleons theft of Paolo Veroneses Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that in 1797 the French tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.

Veronese began painting The Wedding Feast at Cana in June 1562. He was thirty-four and ambitious. In the sixteenth century, San Giorgio Maggiore was a wealthy and powerful Benedictine abbey, and it loomed large in Venetian life. Built of red brick, the monastery stood on the edge of an island across Saint Marks basin from the Doges Palace. Its entrance was set back from the lagoon by a stone quay with wide steps rising from the water to accommodate the long gondolas that on feast days brought the doge. When, two years before, the abbot Girolamo Scrocchetto had renovated the monasterys refectory, he had commissioned the architect Andrea Palladio to design it. Palladios refectory was magnificently simple, almost austere, a monument to Renaissance confidence, humanism, order, harmony, and restraint. Palladio had stripped away all decorative detail to create a long, narrow space, with white stucco side walls, each broken by four tall windows, crowned with classical pedimentswindows that filled the room with light.

It had become the custom in northern Italy for monastic orders to decorate their refectories with a large painting of a New Testament feast, placed on the end wall, so as to be the focus of the room. The biblical feast that Scrocchetto chose for Veronese to paint was the marriage celebration at Cana, in Galilee, at which Jesus performs his first miracle, by changing water into wine. A contract drawn up for Scrocchetto and Veronese specified that the painter Paolo Caliar of Verona will make a painting for us in the new refectory [that] will be as wide and high as the wall, and will cover it completely. The canvas would measure some 22.2 by 32.6 feet. The pictures size alone spoke to the abbots ambition to have Veronese take on Leonardo da Vinci, who between 1495 and 1498 had created the most famous of such feasts in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in MilanThe Last Supper.

Almost from the moment Veronese completed the canvas in 1563, news traveled that he had created an extraordinary work of arta luminous spectacle staged by a large cast including musicians, a banquet taking place outdoors on a marble terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Dusky reds, blues made of powdered lapis lazuli, oranges, evening yellows, greens, and whitesVeronese had lavished color on the canvas as he built the illusion of a crowd of life-sized figures (130 in all) standing, sitting, and moving about in three-dimensional space.

The canvas was one that manifested and measured the achievement of the visual arts in the Italian High Renaissancea picture with intellectual content and an exalted argument to make, in which painted scenes appear to be real, and two-dimensional images of the most beautiful things seem more beautiful than the things themselves.

Everywhere Veronese impresses with the virtuosity of his performancethe absolute mastery of oil paint. He conjures a sheet of paper balanced on a table, the anatomy of an arm as it lifts a jar, or, in the distance, columns and porticoes that could have been designed by Palladio. He can make a single brushstroke of white read as a ribbon, a lock of hair, the cuff of a silk sleeve, or the worn marble of a fluted column.

Across The Wedding Feast at Cana sweeps a scene of pleasure and delight. A long horizontal table is set in an open square and seated with myriad guests, below a stone balustrade, a second terrace, and an azure sky. Around the table, Veronese has crowded many more figurescostumed in silk and other fabrics famously manufactured in Venice and generating a share of the Republics wealth. Along the upper terrace, above the balustrade, servants are streaming, preparing food, handing off pitchers, and carrying trays. High up, a figure in chalky pink steadies himself on a column, near a wall of silver plates, and gestures to a man with outstretched arms below. Here, on a wide canvas ground, Veronese wove together his evolving skills of visual seduction.

In the background, the artist has erected grand classical buildings of his own inventionfaades with towering columns, some made of pink marble and others of white stone. With the vertical geometry of the architecture, he anchors the horizontal crowd. At the center of the table, seated with the other guests, is Jesus, in blue and redweightless and ethereal, an image from an icon, a divine presence, in the midst of the mortal crowd, looking straight out. By setting the miracle in the center of Venetian society, Veronese suggested that a divine revelation could happen in Venice. He seemed to ask: What does the biblical story mean in the flux of contemporary life?

Palladio had planned a ceremonial approach to the refectory. Visitors entered the building from a columned cloister, climbed twelve stone steps (one for each of the apostles), walked through a twenty-foot-high doorway into an antechamber (with two monumental red marble water basins), then up three more steps to reach a second towering doorthe entrance to the room. But even from the first flight of stairs, the Veronese took charge of the view. The second twenty-foot doorway framed the figure of a handsome, dark-haired musician with a high forehead and an aquiline nose who is dressed in white and plays a viola da gamba.

No small part of Veroneses success was the way the opulent canvas worked with the spare architecture of Palladios classical refectory. Down the side walls and across the front of the room ran dark wooden seats and paneling that rose some eight feet, like wainscoting. There, on either side of the refectory, the Benedictines sat at long narrow tables and took their meals in silence, while one of the order, standing in a pulpit high up on a side wall, read aloud from the Bible. Facing into the room, each could observe the abbot at the head table and, above him, on the wall at the level of the windows, the Veronese. The painting climbed from the dark paneling to the ceiling, and it ran horizontally all the way to the side walls, so that nothing interrupted the illusion that the refectory opened onto the terrace and the scene was in progress outside. As Veroneses expansive canvas decorated Palladios elegant room, Palladios architecture framed Veroneses picture.

From the rest of Italy and then from farther north, artists made their way to Venice to study Veroneses Wedding Feast at Cana and to paint copies. All the sculptors come and the painters to admire it three, four, and six times and PAOLO is praised with eternal fame, wrote Benedetto Guidi, a monk at San Giorgio Maggiore who observed the traffic of viewers. Commentators tried to explain the brilliance of the picture. Annibale Carracci, a baroque master from Bologna, called it one of the most beautiful paintings, or rather one of the greatest ever made with a brush. In his 1674