FIRST FRIDAY BOOK CLUB | PLUNDER: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Salzman

Join The Friends for another lively First Friday Book Club.

A single painting, Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, provides the catalyst for a story which encompasses the creation of this masterpiece in 1562 leading the reader to Napoleon’s seizure of it in 1797 to provide art work for the Louvre.

This one painting, measuring more than 22 by 32 feet, represents Napoleon’s appropriation of European art and is a catalyst to examining Napoleon’s life in a complex historical era.

Today the Wedding Feast at Cana shares a salon with the Mona Lisa. A major modern dilemma is also examined, thus the question arises, how many works in museums are of questionable ownership?

Recommended by Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum as “… a superbly well-written account of Napoleon’s plundering of European art, all for the good of the Enlightenment.”

SALZMAN, Cynthia, PLUNDER: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast, Farrar, Straus and Girou, 2022

Image: Supplied