by Noah Charney
Led by Wicar, the Commission of Arts and Sciences made their first Italian stop in May 1796: recently vanquished Modena. There they confiscated not only the agreed-on twenty pictures for the Republic but the duke’s collection of cameos and an unrecorded number of other works for themselves. Citizen Wicar proved an ingenious criminal, siphoning off fine works, particularly those in the easily smuggled medium of works on paper, then selling them to international dealers for a vast fortune. He single-handedly stole fifty paintings and an undisclosed number of drawings from Modena for himself. The private looting of the Duke of Modena’s collection ended only when Napoleon arrived on the scene. He prevented his commissioners from taking anything more. Then he chose two paintings for himself.
The precedent was set, one that would be followed in victories over Parma, Milan, Mantua, and Venice, among others. Art was demanded as payment in the armistice. This demand would be followed by looting well in excess of the armistice agreement, when the time came to collect. Works by Michelangelo, Guercino, Titian, Veronese, Correggio, Raphael, and Leonardo were among those taken, as well as antiquities like the famous Quadriga, the bronze horses of Basilica San Marco in Venice, looted from Byzantium in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade and now “transplanted” to Paris.
Other cities in Napoleon’s path took measures to protect their artistic treasures. Naples did not engage Napoleon in combat, but rather signed a treaty immediately, as did Turin. As a result, these two cities lost the least to plunder.
Pope Pius VI agreed to terms with Napoleon in June 1796, but paid heavily. In addition to the payment of 21 million livres in money and goods (approximately $60 million today), Article 8 of the Treaty of Tolentine stated that the pope was to hand over: “A hundred pictures, busts, vases or statues to be selected by the commissioners and sent to Rome, including in particular the bronze bust of Junius Brutus and the marble bust of Marcus Brutus, both on the Capitol, also five hundred manuscripts at the choice of the said commissioners.” Among the one hundred works were eighty-three sculptures, including the great Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere and Raphael’s marvelous painting The Transfiguration. Adding insult to injury, the Vatican was required to pay for the transport of all of the art forced from it by the French, for an astonishing sum of 800,000 livres, about $2.3 million today. Forty paintings were taken from papal dominion in Bologna and ten more from Ferrara. The looted art of Bologna alone required eighty-six wagons to transport. Napoleon wrote: “The Commission of experts has made a fine haul in Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Ancona, Loretto, and Perugia. The whole lot will be forwarded to Paris without delay. There is also the consignment from Rome itself. We have stripped Italy of everything of artistic worth, with the exception of a few objects in Turin and Naples!”
Along with the “official,” that is to say regime-legitimized, looting, there were thousands of private art thefts, works siphoned off by officials during the looting process or by civilians taking advantage of the wartime chaos. The handiwork of Citizen Wicar exemplifies the scavenger thefts of the Napoleonic era. What the keeper of antiquities for the Louvre stole from the Duke of Modena was just an appetizer. Throughout the Napoleonic campaigns, Wicar swiped literally thousands of drawings, becoming one of the preeminent suppliers of art, stolen or otherwise, in history. Wicar stole so many drawings, in fact, that despite selling most of them during his lifetime, he had enough left to will 1,436 drawings as a gift to his birthplace, the city of Lille, upon his death in 1843.
While records remain of the official confiscations of artwork in the wake of Napoleon’s victories, we can only imagine the extent of the thefts off the record. From Italy alone, leaving aside the multitudinous thefts from Rome, officially recorded confiscations amount to 241 paintings. The seizures from Rome itself were in the thousands. How many more were taken unofficially, or how many records were lost or altered, remains unknown. Italy was by no means alone in being stripped of art. Greece, Turkey, and Egypt lost vast quantities of antiquities, but it was the rich collections of central and western Europe that yielded the largest measure of plunder. In one region of Germany, Brunswick, at least 1,129 paintings were removed, both officially and covertly, as well as 18,000 antique coins and 1,500 precious gems. Of these, 278 works of art were directed for display at the Louvre.
Citizen Wicar was out for personal gain more than for the glory of the Louvre. He happily exploited a chaotic situation, but he was not influential in Napoleonic policy. He did not have access to the general’s ear, and he would not leave a legacy beyond his colorful story and reputation (and the 1,436 stolen drawings bequeathed to his hometown). One man had all the power that Wicar did not, and proved instrumental not only to Napoleon’s arts policy but to the history of museums themselves. He was Napoleon’s mastermind art hunter.
Dominique Vivant Denon served as the architect of the art looting and assembly at the Louvre during Napoleon’s reign. As an artist in the court of Louis XV, Denon gave drawing lessons to the king’s favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Highly intelligent, charming, and cultivated, he was also active in the political arena, working as an ambassador in Saint Petersburg to the court of Catherine the Great and in Naples, which was then the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He was wise enough to be abroad in 1789, when the Revolution began—in Venice, where he had plans to live with his mistress and establish an engraving studio. But he was expelled from Venice under suspicion of collaboration with revolutionary exiles, which may in fact have been true, as his allegiances swung wherever advantage lay. He moved to Florence and might have remained there, but he learned that his name was listed among those whose property could be confiscated by the revolutionaries. Denon made the brave and perhaps foolish decision to return to France in an effort to save his property.
Though a royalist, he was saved from the guillotine in 1798 by the intervention of the leading painter of the Revolutionary period (and the former teacher of the nimble-fingered Citizen Wicar), Jacques-Louis David. David was able to dissuade the revolutionaries from executing Denon because Denon had commissioned David to document meetings of the revolutionaries in Paris. While this was surely an action motivated by artistic rather than revolutionary ideals, it sufficed to persuade the revolutionaries that Denon did not need to be killed. Denon would begin a new life in support of the French Republic.
Denon’s allegiance shifted with the prevailing winds. He had begun his life with the aristocratic title of Chevalier de Non. But, in that era, to save oneself, a certain degree of flexibility was necessary. From minor nobility, he became Citizen Denon, designing the uniforms for the French Republican army (he would shift once more, becoming Baron Denon when Napoleon reinstituted the ancien régime system of titles). In 1797 he befriended the young Josephine de Beauharnais, recently married to Napoleon, at that time a general. Through Josephine, Denon grew close to Napoleon. He was chosen to accompany the general as an official artist on his 1798 campaign in Egypt. During this campaign Napoleon’s men stole the Rosetta Stone, the Sphinx was damaged by his soldiers, and Denon became one of Napoleon’s confidantes and his main artistic advisor.
Napoleon was no connoisseur of art. He admired works based on their size and their lifelike naturalism. Denon gently guided Napoleon in matters of taste but was largely content to siphon off for the Louvre the works most important to the history of art, those that required greater knowledge or more subtle tastes to appreciate, leaving the large realistic paintings for Napoleon’s personal collection. Denon would accompany Napoleon on most of his later campaigns, advising on which artworks to confiscate and send to the Louvre. His nickname was l’emballeur, “the packer,” for his constant supervision of the packing and shipping to Paris of looted artworks.
Denon was a pocket philosopher, capable of some intriguing insights, but most often at a superficial level. He spent his time on the Napoleonic campaigns drawing monuments and occasionally sketching battles as they took place—it is said that he supported his drawing board across his sadd
le as he rode on horseback alongside a raging battle, sketching frantically, cannon fire all around. When the French army reached the ruined Greek city of Thebes, Denon wrote of an incident that was wonderfully romantic, if it can be believed: “[The ruined city was] a phantom so gigantic . . . that the army, coming in view of its scattered ruins, stopped of its own accord and, in one spontaneous moment, burst into applause.” He waxed poetic on the subject of war and how history can rewrite itself: “War, how brilliant you shine in history! But seen close up, how hideous you become, when history no longer hides the horror of your details.”
This line would prove prophetic: History writers deftly cleaned up the looting of art during war, as Denon did himself on 1 October 1803. On that day, one hundred cases packed full of antiquities looted from Italy arrived at the Louvre without a single object broken en route. Denon took the opportunity to make a speech to the members of the Institut de France, an intellectual salon group with mystical/religious interests that had been established in 1795 by former members of the French Masonic Lodge. Presenting treasures that included the Venus de Medici and the Capitoline Venus, Denon proclaimed, “The hero of our century, during the torment of war, required of our enemies trophies of peace, and he has seen to their conservation.”
Denon was the first director of the Louvre, officially rising to the post in 1802. His role in art looting notwithstanding, Denon was an ingenious museum director, helping to shape the way we conceive of museums today. He thought that a museum should present a “complete set” of the best representations of every artistic movement that one could acquire, from “the Renaissance of the arts until our own time.” In this way, the museum should provide “a history course in the art of painting,” presenting its collection with “a character of order, instruction, and classification,” as Denon wrote in a letter to Napoleon in 1803. To this end, Denon rein-vented the manner of displaying paintings. Before this time, works were hung from floor to ceiling in a rather haphazard manner, covering the walls with frames. Denon came up with the idea of isolating art for better contemplation, framing each work in the center of the wall, and displaying works of art that would have an artistic or theoretical dialogue near each other. He believed that one could learn through the way that art was displayed, not merely from the art itself.
When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, Denon was made inspector general of French museums, ostensibly the director of all national collections. Both he and Napoleon understood that there was symbolic power in the capture and display of the cultural treasures of fallen nations. When he was not traveling recently conquered Europe, seizing thousands of artworks of the highest quality, Denon installed himself at the Louvre, surrounded by an art historian’s fantasy. The museum would become the Hall of Wonders, starring the jewels of the conquered world, available for the delectation of triumphant France.
The Louvre—originally known as the Muséum Français, then the Musée Central des Arts, then the Musée Napoleon from 1803 to 1814, before becoming the Musée du Louvre—developed into a popular pilgrimage point for the cultured traveler. The accumulation of looted art in Paris was a constant point of discussion in European publications and elicited a great deal of interest in what might be called “illicit art tourism.”
In 1802 Henry Milton, an Englishman traveling to Paris specifically to see the loot-stocked Louvre, wrote: “Bands of practiced robbers who could not find an outlet for their talents in their homeland were shipped abroad to commit crimes under another, less discreditable name. . . . Hordes of thieves in the form of experts and connoisseurs accompanied their armies to take possession, either by dictation or naked force, of all that seemed to them worth taking.” Milton’s indignation, a feature of his 1815 book Letters on the Fine Arts Written from Paris, did not prevent him from visiting and admiring the art itself. One might object in principle to a circus display of caged endangered creatures, yet buy a ticket to the show all the same.
Milton exemplified a new breed of tourist, one who traveled to Paris to admire the new and best museum in the world, comprising the choicest plunder from all of Europe. The general consensus was some balance between horror and awe. The French had done something of which past powers might only have dreamt and to which future powers, particularly the Nazis, would aspire. They had turned their national gallery into a supermuseum, containing the cream of the art of the Western world.
At the Louvre, Denon’s goal was to assemble the world’s finest, and most complete, collection of art. Napoleon was proudest of having stolen the prized Apollo Belvedere from the Vatican—less because of its importance as an antiquity, but because he had pried it loose from the papal collection. Denon was more interested in paintings, and now he ruled over one of the world’s most important paintings, The Ghent Altarpiece. But Denon was painfully aware that the stolen prize was incomplete. The Louvre displayed the glorious central panels: the glowing jewels in God the Father’s crown, the individual hairs on John the Baptist’s cascading beard, the blood spilling into the chalice from the neck of the lamb on the altar. But Denon wondered about the wings, and Adam and Eve. Why had Citizen Barbier not confiscated them as well, eight years prior? For a true connoisseur, an incomplete masterpiece was a source of frustration, an unclosed wound. To have only the central panels of van Eyck’s masterpiece was like having Michelangelo’s David on display without its legs or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with no hair.
In 1802, finally at the reins of the Louvre, Denon sought to right this confiscation oversight. Since the 1795 annexation of the Austrian Netherlands to France, relations with Ghent were no longer such that Denon could easily arrange further thefts from the cathedral. So Denon tried another tactic—negotiation. He contacted the bishop of Ghent and mayor of the city, asking if they would sell him the wing and Adam and Eve panels, so that The Lamb could be whole once more, albeit in Paris.
The bishop and the mayor declined. They would not sell off a national treasure. So Denon offered a trade: paintings by Rubens, another Flemish master, in exchange for the remaining panels. They could swap one national treasure for another. But Rubens was from Antwerp, a rival city to Ghent. A neighboring masterpiece would not do. The morale of the city was linked to the maintenance of its flag—The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. It was insult enough that the central panels had been taken. The wings at least must remain.
This was the first of several wars in which The Ghent Altarpiece was a prized spoil. Much of the desire to possess the painting was due to the fact that so many other people sought it, for either personal or national collections. The desirability of the artwork accrued with each high-profile incident of its capture and return. Denon sought it for the Louvre, and because of the high esteem in which he held the painting, its fame grew.
While Denon was building the Louvre through military-imposed theft, all the while portraying his efforts as noble, the city of Ghent could claim a heroic thief of its own. By the end of the eighteenth century Ghent had lost its status as an industrial and economic presence. Then a singular event, a theft of an altogether different sort, resurrected the battered and weak city.
In 1799 the English had a brief monopoly on Europe’s cotton industry after the spinning mule, the key mechanical component of a cotton mill, was invented by Samuel Crompton. This invention made it possible to mechanically convert raw cotton into yarn, from which textiles could be made. Thanks to the spinning mule, England was the cotton leader of the Western world—a position of incredible economic value that lasted only one year.
In order to revive the flagging economy of his beloved native city, a Belgian entrepreneur named Lieven Bauwens traveled to England, stole the blueprints for a spinning mule, and smuggled them out of England and back to the continent.
From the blueprints, the first cotton mill in continental Europe was built in Paris in late 1799, breaking the short-lived English monopoly. In thanks for the efforts of its citizens on behalf of France and all its territories, Ghent was permitted to build the second cotton
mill on the continent in 1800. The city that had, historically, thrived on the textile industry would do so once more. Ghent sprung from war-torn silence into an economic power, one of the most important in French-occupied territory.
Bauwens was visited by Napoleon in 1810 and awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor, for his heroism. He became a leading industrialist in the city and was even made mayor for one year. The city whose greatest treasure would be stolen again and again was resuscitated by its own daring act of theft.
That same year proved tragic for another great Belgian city. French troops occupying Bruges stripped its cathedral, Saint Donatian, of all its art, including another van Eyck masterpiece, the Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1436). Then they demolished the cathedral. The tomb of Jan van Eyck was destroyed along with it. The Austrian Netherlands had been a hotbed of religious passion, with the University of Louvain a Catholic stronghold. In 1789 there had been a collective dismay at the religious reforms of Emperor Joseph II. Once the region of Bruges and Antwerp was officially annexed to France, the Directory began to enforce the French manner of public worship and monastic practices throughout the Austrian Netherlands. There was concern that the fervent Catholicism of the region could become a rallying point for rebellion against French control. Religious orders were suppressed, including the diocese of Bruges, as was the wearing of clerical garb. Many religious institutions, aside from those dedicated to teaching or caring for the ill, were closed. The diocese of Bruges was suppressed from 1794 to 1795, as the region of Bruges and Antwerp was officially annexed to France. No bishop held see there until 1834, as the region was absorbed into the nearest French bishopric.