Plunder

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¿ sp