Napoleonic spoliations: the legal and cultural reasons for the removals

When one associates Napoleon Bonaparte (Ajaccio, 1769 - St. Helena, 1821) with art history, the most immediate link is with the Napoleonic despoliations, that is, the long sequence of artwork embezzlements and requisitions that French soldiers operated in the territories conquered by Napoleon between 1796 and 1815, in different areas of Europe, especially in Italy. It is practically impossible to estimate how many works of art left the peninsula to reach France, or even simply the number of those that were requisitioned from their territories of origin and were placed in museums in major Italian cities (such as the Pinacoteca di Brera or that of Bologna) selected by the Napoleonic regime to house the pieces that left their areas of origin: today, most of these works remain in France, others have returned to their places of origin, and still others have ended up at museums and collections around the world. Others, however, were destroyed: emblematic, for example, is the case of the Jewel of Vicenza, the ancient silver model of the city, offered as an ex-voto to the Madonna of Monte Berico in 1578, and reproduced in 2013 to symbolically return it to the city. According to French historian Yann Potin, the Napoleonic spoliations forever changed the cultural geography of the whole of Europe.

Taking the route to France were paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, books, manuscripts, medals, scientific instruments, gold, silver and jewelry, crystal, textiles, and objects of any kind that had economic and cultural interest. A large part of the works came from churches in the territory as a result of the "Napoleonic suppressions,“ the measures by which most ecclesiastical institutions (religious orders, congregations, confraternities and the like) were cancelled and secularized: the goods were therefore either requisitioned or given to civil institutions or state property. At first it was Napoleon himself who thought he could select the works to be seized: this is evidenced by a letter the general sent on May 1, 1796, to Guillaume-Charles Faipoult, who held the post of French minister plenipotentiary in Genoa, in which he asked the latter to send him ”three or four well-known artists to choose what is convenient to take and bring to Paris." In response, the Directory (i.e., the government of revolutionary France), on May 11, decided to appoint “Government Commissioners to search for scientific and artistic objects in the countries conquered by the armies of the Republic.” Four commissioners, two scientists and two artists, were appointed on May 13, although three of them refused to leave. The new team was thus selected on May 14; it consisted of six people, one of whom was replaced shortly thereafter: they were mathematician Gaspard Monge, chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, botanists André Thouin and Jacques-Julien Houtu de La Billardière, architect Jean Guillaume Moitte (who replaced sculptor Claude Dejoux) and painter Jean-Simon Berthélemy. Many others would be added later. The commissioners, who followed the army as it moved through Italian territory, had the task of choosing the works to be catalogued, requisitioned and sent to France (churches were precisely the buildings most affected by the looting). It was a long job, conducted sometimes meticulously and sometimes in crude ways (several works were heavily damaged), which deprived Italy of many works and contributed to Napoleon’s “art thief” reputation.

Antonio Canova and workshop, Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte (1803-1822?; marble, height 76 cm; St. Petersburg, Hermitage)

The history of requisitions: what were the main works that went to France

Napoleonic spoliations proceeded hand in hand with France’s conquest of Italian territory: requisitions began from the north following the west-east direction. The Kingdom of Sardinia was the first to suffer the spoliations, following thearmistice of Cherasco, signed between the two sides on April 28, 1796: the treaty imposed on the Kingdom of Sardinia, in addition to the cession to France of Nice and Savoy, the occupation of a large part of the territory, and the free passage of the French army, the cession of one hundred works of art as compensation. Among the major masterpieces that took the road to Paris was Rogier van der Weyden’sAnnunciation, now divided between the Louvre and the Savoy Gallery. Milan and Lombardy soon followed: the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, from which Leonardo da Vinci’s Atlantic Codex was removed, was the main victim, but some churches in the area also suffered systematic looting. For example, Titian’sCoronation of Thorns, the predecessor of the canvas that the artist painted thirty years later and which is now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, was taken to Paris (the work requisitioned by the French was in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and is now in the Louvre), and from Mantua the celebrated Madonna della Vittoria was taken to France, a masterpiece by Andrea Mantegna that was in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, also now in the Louvre, and also from Mantua were requisitioned masterpieces by Veronese (such as the Temptations of St. Anthony Abbot from the Cathedral, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen) and Rubens (such as the Transfiguration from the Jesuit church, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy).

Systematic looting was carried out in Emilia, where Napoleon’s army transited between the summer and fall of 1796: the Este collections and churches in the area, which included a variety of works by Guido Reni, Annibale Carracci, Ludovico Carracci, Guercino, Lionello Spada, Alessandro Tiarini, Giulio Cesare Procaccini and several other great painters, were plundered. Probably the most famous of the works taken to France were Raphael’sEcstasy of Saint Cecilia, kept in the church of San Giovanni in Monte in Bologna and shipped to France in 1798, and Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents, which was in the church of San Domenico in Bologna: both works were later returned and are now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. Piacenza was not spared the Duomo. On February 19, 1797, France signed with the church state the Treaty of Tolentino, which among its clauses also included the cession of many works of art from the papal territories. Rome was deprived of many valuable works, including ancient ones (such as the Laocoon, theApollo del Belvedere and the Belvedere Torso, the Capitoline Venus, then all returned after the Restoration) and modern ones, starting with paintings by Raphael (the Transfiguration among others) and other great artists (e.g., the Pala dei Decemviri and the Marriage of the Virgin by Perugino, the Montefeltro Altarpiece by Piero della Francesca that is now in Brera, theAnnunciation by Federico Barocci): many works confiscated in the papal territories returned after 1815 thanks to the work of Antonio Canova, who was sent to Paris by Pope Pius VII as commissioner in charge of recovering works taken by the French during the occupation.

Also very painful were the spoliations to which the Republic of Venice was subjected, which after the Treaty of Campoformio, signed on October 17, 1797, moreover lost its independence as France ceded it to Austria in exchange for recognition of the Cisalpine Republic. The Austrians took up residence in the city on January 18, 1798: in the meantime, the French had taken everything they could. Its celebrated bronze horses were pulled down from St. Mark’s basilica, the basilica’s treasure was melted down, the Bucintoro was dismantled for gold to be melted down, and then churches, palaces, and convents were subjected to systematic plundering that conveyed to France a great treasure trove of works of art, beginning with such a famous work as Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, now housed in the Louvre on the wall opposite that of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or such as the spectacular paintings that Tintoretto executed for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, later returned to Italy. It was precisely in Venice that the first wave of spoliations ended, but others were to descend on Italy in the following years: Tuscany, for example, which was spared between 1796 and 1797, was also systematically spoliated, once in 1799 and then again between 1811 and 1813 (the Tuscan work “symbolic” of the requisitions is Cimabue’s Majesty now in the Louvre, but other works were transferred to Paris: Giotto ’s Stigmata di san Francesco that were in Pisa, Filippo Lippi’s Pala Barbadori, not to mention numerous objects from the Medici collections, such as Raphael’s La Velata ). In Rome the French commissioners returned between 1798 and 1799, Liguria was sacked again in 1811, in Naples the French arrived in 1802, Parma and some formerly papal territories suffered new plundering in 1811.

Andrea Mantegna, Madonna of Victory (1496; tempera on panel, 280 x 166 cm; Paris, Louvre)

Raphael, Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia (1518; oil on panel transported on canvas, 236 x 149 cm; Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale)

Guido Reni, Strage degli Innocenti (1611; oil on canvas, 268 x 170 cm; Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale)

The legal reasons for Napoleon’s spoliations

The spoliations that Napoleon’s soldiers carried out in the various occupied territories were legally legitimized by the clauses that France imposed on defeated countries during the war. For example, the armistice of Bologna, which was drafted in French and signed on June 23, 1796, stipulated in Article 8 that “The pope will deliver to the French Republic one hundred paintings, busts, vases or statues of the choice of the commissioners who will be sent to Rome, and among these objects will be included the bronze bust of Junius Brutus and the marble bust of Marcus Brutus, both located in the Capitol, and five hundred manuscripts chosen by the said commissioners” (the translation from French is ours). Again, here are the conditions set by the Tolentino treaty for works of art, in Article 13, which confirmed what was established in Bologna: “Article 8 of the armistice treaty signed in Bologna, concerning manuscripts and objects of art, shall be executed in its entirety, and as soon as possible.”

The claim for war indemnities in works of art was an entirely new innovation introduced with the armistice of Cherasco, as Napoleon himself had occasion to point out, in a thought reported in an essay by scholar Sergio Guarino and published in the catalog of the exhibition Il Museo Universale. From Napoleon to Canova (held at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome from December 16, 2016 to March 12, 2017 and dedicated precisely to the theme of Napoleonic spoliations and the birth of the modern museum): “I wished to demand, in the treaty that we have just concluded,” the general reportedly confided to one of the plenipotentiary ministers of the Kingdom of Sardinia shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Cherasco, “a beautiful painting by Gerrit Dou which is the property of the King of Sardinia, and which is considered the masterpiece of the Flemish school; however, I did not know how to place this painting in an armistice, I feared that it would seem a bizarre novelty.” A bizarre novel ty, however, which then became a customary practice, and the clause providing for reparations in works of art was routinely included in treaties with occupied countries, so that the movement of works of art to France had legal legitimacy. For the countries that had suffered looting, it was not easy, after the Restoration, to get back possession of the works, and the states that tried to get the works back (often succeeding, although no one was able to return everything to its places of origin) had to engage in complicated legal battles, but some still managed to prove the nullity of the clauses imposed by Napoleon in addition to the violations that the French themselves had committed during the occupation (many works were in fact removed in violation of the very treaties signed with the occupied countries).

Raphael, Transfiguration (1518-1520; tempera grassa on panel, 410 x 279 cm; Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Pinacoteca Vaticana)

Perugino, Marriage of the Virgin (1501-1504; oil on panel, 234 x 186 cm; Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts)

Piero della Francesca, Montefeltro Altarpiece (1472-1474; tempera on panel, 251 x 172 cm; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera)

Paolo Veronese, Wedding at Cana (1563; oil on canvas, 666 x 990 cm; Paris, Louvre)

The cultural reasons for the Napoleonic spoliations

“If Bonaparte’s choice to legitimize the transfer of artworks to France by explicit articles in diplomatic treaties may appear as an almost sudden insight,” wrote the aforementioned Guarino, "the longer and more complex had been the path that had led Revolutionary France to justify such a mass seizure. And the main justification, beyond the legalcontrivance, was cultural: already a few years earlier, on December 15, 1791, the revolutionary Arnauld-Guy de Kersaint, in a speech on public monuments delivered in Paris, argued that France should become the world beacon of art: “let Paris become a modern Athens, and let the capital of abuses, populated by a race of men regenerated by freedom, become thanks to us the capital of the arts.” And in this sense the works of art of the occupied countries were also being in a certain sense “liberated” from the oppression of ignorance. To understand the views of the French, therefore, it is necessary to understand what was, at that time, the most widespread idea about artistic heritage. The century had matured the idea that antiquities and the arts were, scholar Valter Curzi has written, “an indispensable tool for the education and refinement of the spirit, not a secondary component, moreover, in promoting the image of enlightened governments. Removed from the logic of mere luxury goods or objects linked to worship, works of art and, more generally, artistic production became the mirror of the degree of civilization of a nation and in Enlightenment Europe functional to the aspiration of the most culturally advanced countries to become interpreters and disseminators of universal values.” Hence also the spread of a new type of institution, the museum, whose task, according to the way of thinking of the time, was to catalogue and order the models of the past, “creating a repertoire of forms and images indispensable in artistic creation and in the formulation of contemporary aesthetics,” Curzi writes again.

The radicalization of these ideas thus led the French to feel entitled to redeem the works of vanquished peoples, and particularly illustrative in this regard are two speeches, both dating from 1794. The first was delivered by the painter Jean-Baptiste Wicar (Lille, 1762 - Rome, 1834) on March 6, 1794. It was the presentation of a report on the state of conservation of the casts kept in the Antiquities Room of the Louvre(Rapport sur les figures antiques qui sont au Muséum), in which this passage could be read: “Venerable Antiquities! Inspire us with the true character, the only one worthy to represent freedom and equality, and look already at what is happening because of the contempt we have for the productions of the barbarians, accomplices of servitude and tyranny and whose annihilation will soon follow that of the throne.” The second speech, which is even more explicit, is the one that painter Jacques-Luc Barbier (Nîmes, 1769 - Passy, 1860), a lieutenant in the Army of the North during the Flanders campaign, gave before the National Convention on September 20, 1794, after the region had suffered the first raids on works of art: “The fruits of genius are the heritage of liberty,” Barbier said, justifying on ideological grounds the French thefts in Flemish lands. “For too long these masterpieces have been sullied by the sight of servitude: it is in the bosom of free peoples that the trace of famous men must remain; the cries of slavery are unworthy of their glory, and the honors of kings disturb the peace of their graves. The immortal works of Rubens, Van Dyck and the other founders of the Flemish school are no longer in a foreign land; they are now deposited in the homeland of arts and genius, in the homeland of liberty and holy equality, in the French Republic. It is here, in the National Museum, that the foreigner will come to educate himself.”

Loads of works conquered in foreign countries thus flowed to Paris, where the project of a universal museum (the Musée National, later to become the Musée Napoléon), based in the Louvre, could be fulfilled on the basis of this ideological vision, bringing together the masterpieces of genius from all lands and setting itself the goal of educating the people: the work of art, therefore, was for the first time invested with a new meaning, and the Napoleonic experience, as much as it caused dramatic losses in all the lands into which Napoleon’s army pushed, was also the basis of the democratization of culture for which “the Napoleonic experience marked a fundamentally important transition, and the most valuable legacy remained precisely in the conception and cultural organization of the museum and its social role” (thus Curzi).

Cimabue, Majesty (ca. 1280; tempera on panel and gold ground, 424 x 276 cm; Paris, Louvre)

Giotto, Stigmata of St. Francis (1295-1300; tempera and gold on panel, 313 x 163 cm; Paris, Louvre)

Raphael, The Veiled (1515-1516; oil on canvas transposed from panel, 82 x 60.5 cm; Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina)

Opposition to the project of France

However, the project of revolutionary France, later made its own by Napoleon, also had some opposing voices. For example, the diplomat François Cacault (Nantes, 1743 Clisson, 1805), following the signing of the Treaty of Tolentino, did not hesitate to express his doubts about the appropriateness of looting in a correspondence with Foreign Minister Charles-François Delacroix: “It will be difficult,” argued Cacault, “to take away from the people of Rome their monuments, to which they are very attached, and the commissioners sent to choose them, if they go alone, will certainly risk being assassinated. The most beautiful pieces of Rome are so well known that they have no need at all of commissioners to choose them.”

Among the opposing voices, standing out higher than the rest was that of Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (Paris, 1755 - 1849), France’s fiercest opponent of spoliation, who with his Lettres sur le préjudice qu’occasionneroient aux arts et à la science, le déplacement des monumens de l’art de l’Italie, le démembrement de ses Ecoles, et la spoliation de ses collections, galeries, musées, & c. (also known as Lettres à Miranda from the name of their addressee, the Venezuelan general Francisco de Miranda) expressed all his displeasure about the plundering carried out to the detriment of the vanquished peoples: to this day, the Lettres à Miranda constitute one of the most important texts on the protection of cultural property, as it contributed to the formation of the modern concepts of cultural property, context, and artistic heritage.

There were several points that Quatremère de Quincy challenged in revolutionary cultural policy. Meanwhile, it was not possible, according to the French politician and philosopher, to arrogate to oneself an exclusive right or privilege over the means of education, because this way of “educating” in turn violated freedom: removing works from their areas of origin meant undermining the possibility of the populations of the territories having models to look up to, points of reference with which to educate themselves. Consequently, in a paradoxical way, the nation that aspired to educate the people actually made itself complicit in ignorance: “If you agree on the mere possibility of the prejudice which the displacement of the models and lessons which nature by her omnipotent will, has placed in Italy, and above all in Rome, would bring to the general education of Europe,” wrote Quatremère de Quincy, “you will also agree that the nation which would make itself guilty of this toward Europe, which it would help to make ignorant, would also be the first to be punished by the very ignorance of Europe, which would fall upon it.” Quatremère de Quincy is also one of the first thinkers to insist on the importance of the context to which works of art belong: it is not possible, nor thinkable, nor useful to dismember the contexts to which works of art belong, which are irreplaceable. To arbitrarily take away a work is to impair the context and undermine the possibility of understanding. Moreover, even the idea of bringing the works of all the schools of the world into a single museum was seen by Quatremère de Quincy as a vague purpose: “It is a folly,” he wrote, “to imagine that one can produce, through examples of all schools of painting gathered in a warehouse, the same effects that those schools produce in their own countries.” Rather, the philosopher hoped for the creation of museums spread throughout the territory that would flank the contexts: the real “museum,” in his view, was not only the building in which the works were collected, but also the set of places, sites, streets, and relationships between objects that were established in the territory.

In revolutionary France destined to become Napoleon’s Empire, two ideas thus clashed, that of the universal museum officially pursued, and that of the widespread museum advocated by Quatremère: at the time, however, the winning model was the former, and not only because the plundering continued undaunted until the end of the empire, but also because the idea embodied by the Louvre was soon taken as an example in other European countries. “Napoleon’s great museum,” wrote art historian Paul Wescher, “did not, however, end with the material dispersal of its masterpieces. His inspiring example survived him for a long time, contributing decisively to the formation of all European museums. The Louvre, the national museum of France, had shown for the first time that the darte works of the past, though collected by princes, actually belonged to their peoples, and it was this principle (with lecception of the British royal collection) that inspired the great public museums of the nineteenth century.” And, perhaps paradoxically, the looting by the French also had the effect of reawakening the attachment of the vanquished peoples to their heritage: “The return of the stolen works of art then had, in itself, a remarkable and unexpected effect,” Wescher writes: “mingling with the climate of patriotic enthusiasm aroused by victory and liberation, it helped to create the consciousness of a national artistic heritage, a consciousness that did not exist in the eighteenth century.”

Reference bibliography

• Valter Curzi, Carolina Brook, Claudio Parisi Presicce, The Universal Museum. From Napoleon to Canova, exhibition catalog (Rome, Scuderie del Quirinale, December 16, 2016 to March 12, 2017), Skira, 2016
• Nora Gietz, Tracing Paintings in Napoleonic Italy: Archival Records and the Spatial and Contextual Displacement of Artworks in Artl@s Bulletin, 4, no. 2 (2015), art. 6
• Cathleen Hoeniger, The Art Requisitions by the French under Napoléon and the Detachment of Frescoes in Rome, with an Emphasis on Raphael in CeROArt. Conservation, exposition, Restauration dObjets dArt, HS (April 11, 2012)
• Yann Potin, Kunstbeute und Archivraub. Einige Ã?berlegungen zur Napoleonischen Konfiszierung von Kulturgütern in Europa in Bénédicte Savoy, Yann Potin (eds.), Napoleon und Europa. Traum und Trauma (exhibition catalog, Bonn, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, December 17, 2010 to April 25, 2011), Prestel, 2010, pp. 91-99
• Sabir Lubliner-Mattatia, Monge et les objets dart dItalie in Bulletin de la Sabix. Société des amis de la Bibliothèque et de lHistoire de lÃ?cole polytechnique, 41 (2007), pp. 92-110
• Veronica Gabrielli, Contested Patrimonies. Italian States and the Recovery of Stolen Works of Art in France. History and sources, Polistampa, 2009
• Paul Wescher, The Art Thefts. Napoleon and the Birth of the Louvre, Einaudi, 1988

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