One 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 captivatingstudy 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 Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of 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 getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

Catalog of the exhibition "Veronese: magnificence in Renaissance Venice" held March 19-June 15, 2014 at the National Gallery, London.

Of the triumvirate of sixteenth-century Venetian painters, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, Paolo [Caliari] Veronese (1528-1588) best conveyed Venice's civic splendor. His masterpieces in the Doge's Palace conferred on the Republic a magnificence and authority that was rapidly dwindling by the end of the Renaissance. But on a private level, he also reshaped the fashions of the Serenissima through a steady stream of portrait commissions. Many members of Venice's most elite families sat for Veronese, as did notable artists and authors, including Titian and Sir Phillip Sidney. Once regarded as Venice's best portraitist, his talents in this genre unfortunately remain largely unknown to modern audiences. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the approximately forty portraits that survive. Shedding new light on early works, such as the pendants of the Da Porto and the frescos of the Barbaro in the Palladian villa at Maser, Professor Garton also examines Paolo's images of women within the larger polemics surrounding the anonymous beauties of Giorgione, Palma il Vecchio, and Titian. The author analyzes Veronese's innovations in martial portraiture, melancholic portrayals of artists and nobility, and evocations of the antique. Relevant issues of social history, class insecurity, and poetic convention are all brought to bear in deciphering the meanings of these images and what they reveal about the painter and his clientele. This layered study of Venice's golden age of painting ends appropriately with a glance at the moderns who profited most from the study of Veronese's portraits: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Henri Fantin-Latour, Mary Cassatt, and Henri Matisse. A complete catalogue of Veronese's portraits follows the chapters.

"For nearly four decades in the sixteenth century, the careers of Renaissance Venice's three greatest painters - Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese - overlapped, encouraging mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed the course of art history. Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In this environment, the three artists - brilliant, ambitious, and fiercely competitive - vied with each other for primacy, deploying the new combination of oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable signature touch. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that allowed for unprecedented fame in their lifetimes. With more than 160 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the "Venetian style"--Characterized by loose technique. rich coloring, and often sensual subject matter - as well as the social, political, and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of new approaches to studies of such crucial institutions as state commissions and the private patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, the volume presents a vibrant human portrait - one brimming with intense competition, one-upmanship, humor, and passion."--Jacket.