Napoleonic looting of art

The Napoleonic looting of art () was a series of confiscations, particularly of artworks and precious objects, carried out by the French army or French officials in the territories of the First French Empire, including the Italian peninsula, Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and Central Europe. The looting continued for nearly 20 years, from 1797 to the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
During the Napoleonic era, an unknown but immense quantity of art was acquired, destroyed, or lost through treaties, public auctions, and unsanctioned seizures. Coins and objects made of precious metals, like the "Jewel of Vicenza" and the Venetian state barge "Bucintoro", were melted down for easier sale and transport, to finance French military wages. In the confusion, many artworks and manuscripts were lost in transit or broken into pieces, which were often never reunited, as occurred with the marble columns of the Aachen Cathedral.
French officials justified taking art and other objects of value as both a right of conquest and as an advancement of public education, encyclopedism, and Enlightenment ideals. These seizures redefined the right of conquest in Europe, and caused a surge of interest in art and art conservation.
During the Congress of Vienna, Austria, Spain, the German states, and England ordered the restitution of all the removed artworks. Many works were returned; but many remained in France, due to resistance from the French administration, the high costs of transportation, and the risk of damage to fragile works. With not all the art returned, Napoleonic looting continues to affect European politics, museology, and national cultural identity today.
History.
Background.
After the French Revolution, the new government had to decide whether or how to nationalize artworks from churches, the fleeing nobility of the Ancien Régime, and the royal collections. In some cases, French iconoclasts destroyed artworks, particularly those that represented royalty or feudalism. Other works were put up for public auction to replenish the Republic's empty coffers and were bought and transported to other European collections.
With the intervention of abbot Henri Gregoire in 1794, the French revolutionary government moved to stop the vandalism and destruction of artworks by claiming them as a source of national heritage. All around France, works were placed in storage or for display in museums, like the Louvre, and enormous inventories of the confiscated works were attempted. Regional French museums resisted attempts at centralized control of their collections, but the newly instituted French Directorate created commissions to encourage compliance. In many cases, this saved works of medieval or Gothic art from destruction, often through the intervention of experts like architect Alexandre Lenoir, abbot Nicolas Bergeat, and artist Louis Watteau.
From the start of the 18th century, the French people had clamored for more public art exhibitions, creating a need for new artworks and their display. And the increased collections needed new institutions to manage them. The Musée des Monuments Français, whose collection would later be transferred to the Louvre and the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon are two prominent examples of art museums. The new science museums included the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle.
The previously disorganized Louvre collection became was cataloged and structured through the work of the scholars Ennio Quirino Visconti and Alexandre Lenoir. In November 1802, Napoleon appointed Vivant Denon director of the Louvre, the museums of Versailles, and the royal castle collections due to his successes in the Egyptian campaign. Denon, known as "Napoleon's eye", continued to travel with French military expeditions to Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain to select artworks for France. He also improved the Louvre's layout and lighting to encourage holistic comparisons of the plundered artworks, reflecting new ideas in museology and countering the objections that the artworks lacked meaningful context in France. Denon "deployed flattery and duplicity" to gain further acquisitions, even against Napoleon's wishes. As a result of the Chaptal Decree in 1801, works of greater merit were selected for the Louvre, while less important works were distributed among new French provincial museums like those in Lyon or Marseille, then to smaller museums like Reims, Tours or Arles. At the same time, some Italian fine arts academies were transformed into public museums like in Milan or the Royal Museum of Fine Arts was created in Antwerp.
The influx of paintings also coincided with renewed interest in art restoration methods, under the influence of the restorers Robert Picault and François-Toussaint Hacquin. Many of the works had never been cleaned and needed repair from transportation. Some paintings were restored or altered, such as Raphael's "Madonna of Foligno", which was transferred from its original panel to a canvas support in . In 1798, the Louvre actually exhibited two paintings by Carracci and Perugino that were "half" restored to demonstrate the repairs to the public. These new cultural preservation methods were then used to justify the seizure and alterations of foreign cultural objects.
The French army's removal of murals and frescoes was related to French conservators' tradition of transferring paintings onto new supports. They saw the detachment of wall paintings as no different than moving a wooden altarpiece from its place. Some of the radical treatments were difficult to execute successfully. In 1800, French officials tried to remove the "Deposition", by Daniele da Volterra, from the Orsini chapel of Rome's Trinità dei Monti church. The "stacco a massello" technique—which removed part of the mural's plaster support—undermined the walls of the chapel, and the removal had to be halted to prevent the chapel from caving in. The mural itself had to be extensively restored by Pietro Palmaroli and was never sent to Paris.
Justifications for seizures.
The French government planned to increase museum collections through the confiscation of foreign artworks, as a show of national strength. Its appropriations were at first indiscriminate, but by 1794, the French government developed structured programs for art acquisition through its wars. With its "savant" system, exemplified by the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, experts would select which works should be taken—the system tried to reconcile imperial tribute with the French values of encyclopedism and public education. Its work was supported by peace treaties designed to legitimize their acquisitions: some treaty clauses required the delivery of artworks, and others imposed art acquisitions as tribute from foreign nobility.
In European history, the plundering of artworks had been a common, accepted way for conquerors to exhibit power over their new subjects. In the late 18th century, however, the increased national control of artworks led to regulations that restricted the movement and sale of artworks; and the ideals of enlightened monarchs discouraged treating art as mere plunder.
Still, the French justified their seizures by appealing to the right of conquest and republican ideals of artistic appreciation, as well as the advancement of scientific knowledge and the "scientific cosmopolitanism" of the Republic of Letters. Nord Jean-Luc Barbier, a lieutenant of the Hussars, proclaimed before the national assembly that the works had remained "soiled too long by slavery", and that "these immortal works are no longer on foreign soil. They are brought to the homeland of arts and genius, to the homeland of liberty and sacred equality: the French Republic." Bishop Henri Gregoire said before the Convention in 1794: "If our victorious armies have entered Italy, the removal of the Apollo Belvedere and the Farnese Hercules should be the most brilliant conquest. It is Greece that decorated Rome: why should the masterpieces of the Greek republic decorate a country of slaves? The French Republic should be their final resting place."
Quatremère de Quincy, a student of Winckelmann, and others like him, believed artworks should not be removed from their original context. Beginning in 1796, Quatremère argued against art appropriation. To rediscover the art of the past, he said it would be necessary to "turn to the ruins of Provence, investigate the ruins of Arles, Orange, and restore the beautiful amphitheater of Nimes", instead of looting Rome. Although Quatremère supported centralized cultural knowledge, he believed that uprooting art from its original context as French officials were doing would hopelessly compromise its authentic meaning, creating new meanings instead.
Quatremère's views were in the minority in France, but the conquered nations made appeals along similar lines. In occupied Belgium, there were popular protests against art expropriation, and the Central and Superior Administration of Belgium tried to block French acquisitions. The administration argued that Belgians shouldn't be treated as conquered subjects but "children of the Republic". In Florence, the director of the Uffizi argued that the galleries' collection was already owned by the people of Tuscany, rather than the Grand Duke who signed a treaty with the French. These appeals were sometimes supported by French officials. For example, Charles Nicolas Lacretelle argued that taking Italian art in excess would push Italians to support Hapsburg rule.
The Low Countries and the Rhineland.
After the War of the First Coalition, the Low Countries saw the destruction of monuments, iconoclasm, and art auctions much like that of Paris. French armies began claiming property from within the newly formed Batavian Republic, including from the collection of the House of Orange at The Hague. Their efforts were lead by Hussar lieutenant Nord Jean-Luc Barbier, under the advice of artist and collector Jean-Baptiste Wicar. In 1794, three paintings by Rubens, along with around 5,000 books from the University of Leuven, were sent from Antwerp to Paris, and the first shipment arrived in September 1794. The Louvre received around 200 Flemish old-master paintings, among which were 55 Rubens and 18 Rembrandts, as well as the Proserpina sarcophagus and several marble columns from Aachen Cathedral. Despite the anti-clericalism of France at the time, Flemish artwork with religious subjects were welcomed by Parisian authorities.
In early 1795, France conquered Holland, and one of the "savant" commissions—comprising botanist André Thouin, geologist Barthélemy Faujas de St-Fond, antiquarian Michel Le Blond, and architect Charles de Wailly—accessed the collection of Stadholder William V, who had fled. However, the status of the Batavian Republic as a "sister republic" of France made acquisitions difficult to justify. In March 1795, French officials exempted all Batavian private property from seizure, except for the Stadholder's, because he had been so unpopular. With the Stadholder's collection designated as private property and eligible for appropriation, four shipments of natural history artifacts (minerals, stuffed animals, books, etc.) and 24 paintings were sent to Paris in the late spring of 1795.
As Thouin described the selection works both as tribute and as a way to enforce cultural dependence upon France:
The commission process set a pattern for the systematic appropriations to come, and the French use of experts explains how they could select important Old Master artworks and discern them from copies and pieces made by artists' workshops. The first French exhibitions of the Low Country artworks took place in 1799, and included 56 Rubens, 18 Rembrandts, Van Eyck's "Ghent Altarpiece", and 12 portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger. From 1801 on, the French officials in charge of the new Belgian art institutions tried to resist any further export of their artworks.
Italy.
In Italy, the special commissions used for art appropriation in the Netherlands and Belgium were expanded and worked more systematically. The librarians of the Bibliothèque Nationale had compiled extensive lists of the Italian books they desired. The commission included Jacques-Pierre Tinet; the scientists Claude Louis Berthollet, Pierre Claude François Daunou, and Gaspard Monge; and the artists Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Andrea Appiani, and Jean-Baptiste Moitte. In Lombardy, the Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna, commission members had the authority to select and acquire works at their own discretion. On May 7, 1796, the Directorate ordered Napoleon to transfer goods from the occupied territories in Italy to France:
Napoleon himself had close ties to Italy, which inspired both his imperial ambitions and his appreciation for its art. French rule was also more welcomed than it had been in the Low Countries, especially among Italian intellectuals, which gave the appropriations some popular support.
Regions that were either favorable to French rule—such as those that eventually formed the Cisalpine Republic,—or were geographically hard to reach, had less artwork taken from them. Regions that actively fought the French, such as Parma and Venice, had the transfer of artworks written as a condition of their surrender. The French armies also dissolved monasteries and convents as they went, often taking artworks that had been abandoned or sold in haste.
From the spring of 1796, the first Napoleonic campaign in Italy removed art objects of all kinds, which were sanctioned in provisions of the Treaty of Leoben, the Armistice of Cherasco, the Armistice of Bologna, and the Treaty of Tolentino, culminating with clauses in the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio that transferred artworks from the Austrian Empire and the former Venetian Republic. Over 110 artworks were brought to France in 1796 alone. The early appropriations were organized by Jean-Baptiste Wicar. Drawing on his experience of cataloging the art collections of Italian duchies, Wicar selected which paintings would be sent to Paris from 1797 to 1800. His work was continued later by Vivant Denon.
During the occupations, Napoleonic officials continued to plunder artwork beyond that agreed to in the treaties—the commission had permission to amend the agreed number of artworks. Resistance to these appropriations was decentralized, or sometimes nonexistent, because Italy did not yet exist as a single nation.
Sardegna.
With the Armistice of Cherasco in May 1796, 100 Italian and Flemish artworks fell to France. Turin was made a part of French territory, and the negotiations were particularly cordial. As a result, fewer works were taken from Sardegna, although French attention turned to the documents, the codices of the Regal Archive, and Flemish paintings in the Galleria Sabauda.
Austrian Lombardy.
The French entered Milan in 1796, as part of the first Italian campaign of Napoleon. In May 1796, while there was still fighting at Castello Sforzesco, commissioner Tinet was at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, where he had taken the preparatory drawings of Raphael for his "School of Athens" painting at the Vatican; 12 drawings and the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci; the precious manuscripts of the "Bucolics of the Virgin", with illuminations by Simone Martini; and five landscapes of Jan Brueghel for Carlo Borromeo that had been placed in the Ambrosiana of Milan in 1673. "The Coronation of Thorns", by a follower of Titian between 1542 and 1543, commissioned by the monks of the Church of Santa Maria delle Graces, was sent to the Louvre. Many works were also taken from the Pinacoteca di Brera and the cathedral of Mantua. From the Mantuan church of Santa Trinità, three Rubens works, the "The Baptism of Christ", "The Gonzaga Trinity", and the "Transfiguration" were taken to Paris.
The Codex Atlanticus was eventually returned, in pieces, to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. In fact, many folios of the Codex are stored in Nantes and Basilea, while all the other notebooks and writings of Leonardo are at the national library of France, in Paris.
Modena.
The armistice between Napoleon and the Duke of Modena was signed on 17 May 1796, in Milan by San Romano Federico d'Este, representative of Duke Ercole III. France demanded 20 paintings from the Este Collection and a monetary sum triple that of the Parma armistice. The first shipment was curated by Giuseppe Maria Soli, director of the . The paintings were seized from the apartment of the Duke D'Este and sent to Milan in 1796 with commissioners Tinet and Bethemly. After they arrived in France, they were judged mediocre by Charles-François Lebrun and Napoleon declared the armistice broken due to the violation of its clauses.
On 14 October 1796, Napoleon entered Modena with two new commissioners, Pierre-Anselme Garrau and Antoine Christophe Saliceti, to sift through Modena's galleries of medals, and the ducal palace for collections of cameos and engraved semi-precious stones. On 17 October, after taking many manuscripts and antique books from the ducal library, they shipped 1213 items: 900 bronze imperial Roman coins, 124 coins from Roman colonies, 10 silver coins, 31 shaped medals, 44 coins from the Greek cities, and 103 Papal coins. All were sent to the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, where they still reside.
In February 1797, Napoleon's wife Josephine took up residence at the Ducal Palace of Modena and wished to see the collection of cameos and precious stones. She took around 200 of them, in addition to those taken by her husband. French officials also sent 1300 drawings found in the Este collections to the Louvre, as well as 16 agate cameos, 51 precious stones, and many crystal vases. On 20 October, they took the busts of Lucio Vero and Marcus Aurelius, a drawing of the Trajan Column, and drawings for the busts of the emperors. The second shipment of paintings left on 25 October, when Tinet, Moitte, and Berthelmy chose 28 paintings to send to Paris, together with 554 drawings and four albums of other drawings, for a total of 800 drawings.
Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla.
With the armistice of 9 May 1796, the Dukes of Parma and Piacenza were forced to send 20 paintings, later reduced to 16, selected by French officials. In Piacenza, they chose two canvases from the Cathedral of Parma—"The Funeral of the Virgin" and "The Apostles at the Tomb of the Virgin", by Ludovico Carracci—to be sent to the Louvre. In 1803, by order of the administrator Moreau de Saint Mery, the carvings and decorations of the Palazzo Farnese, as well as the painting "The Spanish Coronation", were removed. Two paintings were taken from the Duomo, those by Giovanni Lanfranco of saints Alessio and Corrado. Ettore Rota published tables of all the art taken: 55 works from the Duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, and 8 bronze objects of Veleja, of which 30 works and the 8 bronzes were eventually returned. "Saint Corrado" by Lanfranco and "The Spanish Coronation" remain in France, where they are on display. The remaining works are missing.
In Parma, after 1803 and the creation of the Taro department, more precious objects were stripped from the Ducal archaeological museum, such as "Tabula Alimentaria Traianea" and . One department prefect complained, after the departure of Vivant Denon, that "there remains nothing to serve as models for the schools of painting in Parma."
Venetian Republic.
The French search for Venetian artworks was led by Monge, Berthollet, Berthelemy, and Tinet, who had previously been in Modena. After the defeat of the Venetian Republic, there were several revolts against the occupying French armies. The resulting reprisals and confiscations were particularly harsh. Gold and silver works from the Zecca of Venice and the Basilica di San Marco were melted down and sent to France or used to pay soldiers' salaries. Religious orders were abolished, and some 70 churches were demolished. Around 30,000 works of art were sold or went missing.
The "Bucintoro", the Venetian state barge, was taken apart along with all its sculptures, much of which was then burned on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to extract their gold leaf. The Arsenal of Venice was dismantled, and the most beautiful arms, armor, and firearms were sent to France, with the rest (including more than 5,000 cannons) being melted down. The weapons shipped to France were mostly placed in the collection of the Musée de l'Armée, including a bronze cannon made to celebrate an alliance between the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway and the Republic of Venice.
"The Wedding at Cana", by Veronese, was cut in two and sent to the Louvre (where it remains). The "San Zeno Altarpiece", by Mantegna, was cut apart and sent as well. Its platforms remain in the Louvre, while the principal panel was returned to Verona, destroying the work's integrity. The Gazola collection of fossils from Mount Bolca was confiscated in May 1797 and deposited in the Museum of Natural History in Paris that September. Gazola was retrospectively compensated with an annuity from 1797 and a pension from 1803. He created a second collection of fossils, which were also confiscated and brought to Paris in 1806.
In April 1797, the French removed the Lion of Saint Mark and famous bronze Horses of Saint Mark. When Napoleon decided to commemorate his victories of 1805 and 1807, he ordered the construction of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and that the horses be placed on top as its only ornamentation. The lion and the horses were returned to Venice, although the lion statue broke before it could be returned to its place in the piazza.
Rome and the Papal States.
After the armistice of Bologna, the Papal States sent over 500 manuscripts and 100 artworks to France on the condition that the French army would not occupy Rome. The Pope had to pay the costs of transporting the manuscripts and artworks to Paris. Commission member Jacques-Pierre Tinet took the Raphael altarpieces ceded by the armistice of Bologna, but also an additional 31 paintings, a number of which were by Raphael and Perugino.
Tensions ran high between the French and the Romans. In August 1796, Roman rioters attacked French commissioners to protest the appropriations, and a French legate was assassinated. The Pope himself worked to undermine the clauses of the peace treaty and to delay the actual shipment of the works. When the French government sent him an ultimatum on September 8, 1797, the Pope declared the treaty and armistice of Bologna null and void. When the Papal armies were defeated, Roman emissaries agreed to the harsher conditions of the Treaty of Tolentino. French officials seized art collections in Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Ancona, and Perugia.
After the General Duphot was accidentally shot and killed outside the French embassy in December 1797, French armies occupied Rome, exiling Pius VI and establishing the short-lived Roman Republic. Although the public was assured that their monuments wouldn't be taken, Napoleonic officials began systematically sacking the city, after compiling an inventory of the Vatican's treasures.
Officials opened the rooms of the Pope and fused Vatican medals of gold and silver for easier transportation. They tried to devise a way to remove the frescoes in the Vatican's Raphael Rooms. The artworks were chosen by Joseph de la Porte du Theil, a French intellectual who knew the Vatican library well. He took, among other things, the Fons Regina, the library of Queen Cristina of Switzerland. Seizures also took place in the Vatican Library, the Biblioteca Estense of Modena, the libraries of Bologna, Monza, Pavia, and Brera. The private library of Pope Pius VI was seized by Pierre Daunou after it was put up for sale.
General Pommereul planned to remove Trajan's Column from Rome and send it to France, probably in pieces. This proposal was not acted on, however, due to the cost of transportation and the administrative obstacles created by the Church to slow the process.
For their anti-French advocacy, the cardinals Albani and Braschi had their collections seized, from the Villa Albani and the Palazzo Braschi, respectively. In May, Daunou wrote that the classical sculptures from Villa Albani filled over 280 crates, all to be sent to Paris. The Swiss sculptor Heinrich Keller described the chaotic scene in Rome:
In 1809, collections of marbles were sold to Napoleon by Camillo, the Borghese prince, who was under significant financial strain due to the heavy taxation imposed by the French. The prince didn't receive the promised sum, but was paid in land requisitioned from the Church and with mineral rights in Lazio. (Following the Congress of Vienna, the prince had to return all such compensation to their legitimate owners.)
Tuscany.
From March 1799, after Florence was occupied by the Napoleonic armies, Jean-Baptiste Wicar chose which paintings would be taken from the Palazzo Pitti and sent to Paris. In total, 63 paintings and 25 pieces of pietre dure were taken from Florence. In 1803, the "Venus de' Medici" was exported to France at the express order of Napoleon.
The later looting of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was led out by the director of the Louvre himself, Vivant Denon. Through the summer and winter of 1811, after the Kingdom of Etruria had been annexed by the French empire, Denon took artworks from dissolved churches and convents in Genoa, Massa, Carrara, Pisa, Volterra, and Florence. In Arezzo, Denon took "The Annunciation of the Virgin", by Giorgio Vasari, from the Church of Santa Maria Novella d'Arezzo. His choices were odd for the time: the work of "primitive" or Gothic Italian artists of the 14th and 15th century was looked down upon.
In Florence, Denon searched the convent of Saint Catherine, the churches of Santa Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi and Santo Spirito, and the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Firenze, and sent back works to the Louvre, such as the Fra Filippo Lippi's "Barbadori Altarpiece" from Santo Spirito, Cimabue's "Maestà", and Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures for the tomb of Pope Julius II were sent to the Louvre..
Naples.
In January 1799, General Jean-Étienne Championnet implemented the same policy regarding acquisitions in the Kingdom of Naples after occupying Naples. In a missive he sent on February 25, he said: 
Paintings, sculpture, books, and gold were all taken by the French during the rule of the short-lived Repubblica Napoletana. The previous year, fearing the worst, Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies had transferred 14 masterpieces to Palermo; but the French soldiers plundered many works from nearby collections like the Gallerie di Capodimonte and the Palace of Capodimonte.
The catalog of Canova.
As a papal diplomat, the sculptor Antonio Canova made a list of Italian paintings that were sent to France. Below is the list, as reported by French sources, which also notes how many works were subsequently repatriated or lost. Canova was primarily concerned with figurative works and sculptures, omitting minor or merely decorative artworks.
Victory celebrations of 1798.
On the ninth and tenth of Thermidor in Year 6 of the French Republican calendar (27 and 28 July 1798), there was a grand celebration of Napoleonic military victories, which coincided with the arrival in Paris of a third convoy carrying artworks from Rome and Venice. The event is represented in a print kept at the National Library of Paris. It shows the first convoy of confiscated goods from the Italian campaign arriving at the "Champs de Mars", in front of the "École Militaire", after it had traveled from the quay by the "Jardin des plantes".
The triumphal parade was planned months ahead of time. As seen in commemorative prints, its motto was, "La Grèce les ceda; Rome les a perdus; leur sort changea deux fois, il ne changera plus" (Greece has fallen; Rome is lost; their luck changed twice, it won't change again). The procession contained the Horses of Saint Mark, Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de' Medici, the Discobolus, the Laocoön group, and sixty other works, among which were nine Raphaels, two Correggios, collections of antiques and minerals, exotic animals, and Vatican manuscripts. Popular attention was also drawn to the exotic animals and the Black Madonna of the Basilica della Santa Casa, believed to be the work of Saint Luke.
Egypt and Syria.
After Italy, the Napoleonic army began its campaign in Egypt and Syria. The army brought a contingent of 167 scholars with it, including Vivant Denon, the scientist Gaspard Monge, and mathematician Jean Fourier. This scientific expedition undertook excavations and scientific studies to study Egypt's pyramids, temples, and Pharaonic statues, like the tomb of Amenhotep III.
Looting from the area was not even considered a violation of international norms by Europeans, due to the influence of orientalism and European countries' tense relations with the Ottoman Empire. Most of objects taken by the French army were lost to the British, including the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II and the Rosetta Stone, after the Battle of the Nile in 1798, and were sent to the British Museum instead. The French scholars' studies culminated in the "Mémoires sur l'Égypte" and the monumental "Description de l'Égypte" encyclopedia, which was finished in 1822.
Northern Europe.
Following the Treaty of Lunéville between the French Republic and the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) in 1801, manuscripts, codices, and paintings began to flow from northern and central Europe to Paris. In Bavaria, the works were selected by a Parisian professor, Neveu. Neveu delivered a list of the confiscated artworks to the Bavarian government, which later allowed them to make requisition requests. However, the HRE imperial collections remained mostly untouched.
With the Peace of Pressburg in December 1805 and the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt shortly after, Vivant Denon and his aides Daru and Stendhal began to systematically appropriate art from regions of the HRE, Westphalia, and Prussia. With Berlin, Charlottenburg, and Sanssouci combed through, Denon went on to relieve the gallery of Cassel of 48 paintings. En route, the paintings were directed to Mainz, where the Empress Josephine saw them and convinced Napoleon to have them sent to Malmaison, as a gift to her. In the end, Denon selected over 299 paintings to take from the Cassel collection. Additionally, nearly 78 paintings were taken from the Duke of Brunswick, and Stendhall collected over 500 illuminated manuscripts and the famous art collection of the deceased Cardinal Mazarin.
In all, over a thousand paintings were taken from German and Austrian cities, including Berlin, Vienna, Nuremberg, and Potsdam—400 objects came from Vienna alone. As in Italy, many works were melted down for easy transport and sale, and two large auctions were held in 1804 and 1811 to fund further French military expeditions.
Spain.
During and after the Peninsular War, hundreds of artworks were seized from Spain, continuing until the first abdication of Napoleon in 1814. Denon again selected works, including some by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Diego Velázquez to send to Paris for display.
With Joseph Bonaparte enthroned in Spain, most of the works came from the Spanish royal collection and were stored at the Prado in Madrid, although the Spanish administration was able to delay their shipment until 1813. From El Escorial palace, Horace Sébastiani and Jean-de-Dieu Soult claimed many Spanish paintings, particularly Murillos, while the general Armagnac claimed mostly Dutch works from the collection. Soult took so many Spanish paintings for himself that his collection eventually made up a significant portion of the Louvre's "Spanish gallery" after his death. The officers Jean Joseph Dessolles and Armand de Caulaincourt also took many works.
In August 1812, the Battle of Salamanca made clear that the French occupation of Spain would be temporary. Joseph Bonaparte tried to flee, and his first attempt at flight consisted of an enormous baggage train of looted objects from the Spanish royal collection. After the 1813 Battle of Vitoria, Joseph Bonaparte abandoned the artworks and fled with his cavalry. British troops captured almost 250 of the abandoned paintings, and they held a public auction to disperse some of the captured art. The Duke of Wellington himself sent around 165 to England. The Duke apparently offered to return the paintings to Ferdinand VII after the wars. Ferdinand declined the offer and allowed the Duke keep the paintings, most of which are now on display at Apsley House.
Restitutions.
During the First Restoration, the allied nations did not initially stipulate the return of artworks from France. They were to be treated as "inalienable property of the Crown." On May 8 of 1814, however, Louis XVIII declared that works not yet hung in French museums would be returned, which led to the return of many of the Spanish works. Manuscripts were returned to Austria and Prussia by the end of 1814, and Prussia recovered all its statues, as well as 10 paintings by Cranach, and 3 by Correggio. The Duke of Brunswich recovered 85 paintings, 174 Limoges porcelains, and 980 majolica vases. But most of the works remained in France. After Napoleon's second surrender at Waterloo and the beginning of the Second Restoration, the return of art became a part of negotiations, although the lack of historical precedent made it a messy affair.
Some nations did not wait for agreements from the Congress of Vienna, in order to act. In July 1815, the Prussians began to force restitutions. Frederick William III of Prussia ordered von Ribbentropp, Jacobi, and Eberhardt de Groote to deal with the returns. On July 8, they demanded Vivant Denon return all the Prussian treasures; but Denon wouldn't obey, claiming that the returns weren't authorized by then-king Louis XVIII. Von Ribbentropp then threatened to have Prussian soldiers seize the works and imprison and extradite Denon to Prussia. By 13 July, all the key Prussian works were out of the Louvre and packed up for travel.
When the Dutch consul arrived at the Louvre to make similar requests, Denon denied him access and wrote to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and the Congress of Vienna:
French museum officials tried to hold onto any objects they had seized, arguing that keeping the artworks in France was a gesture of generosity towards their countries of origin and a tribute to their cultural or scientific importance. In 1815, for example, the French National Museum of Natural History refused the return of artifacts to the Netherlands, claiming that such would necessarily break up the museum's complete collections. The natural historians offered to select and send an "equivalent" collection instead. In the end, with the aid of the Prussians, the delegates from the Low Countries grew so impatient that they took their works back by force.
On 20 September 1815, Austria, England, and Prussia agreed that the remaining artworks should be returned, and affirmed that there was no principle of conquest that would permit France to retain its spoils. The Russian tsar Alexander I of Russia was not part of this agreement, and preferred to compromise with the French government, having just acquired for the Hermitage 38 artworks sold by descendants of Josephine Bonaparte, to discharge her debts. The tsar had also received a gift from her shortly before her death in 1814—the Gonzaga Cameo from the Vatican. After the Vienna agreement was completed, the occupying forces of Paris continued to remove and send artworks to Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and some Italian cities.
The French resented the returns and argued that they were illegal, since they didn't have the force of treaty. Writing about a shipment of paintings to Milan, Stendhal said, "The allies took 150 paintings. I hope to be authorized to observe that "we" have taken them through the Treaty of Tolentino. The allies took our paintings without a treaty." On the repatriation of Giulio Romano's "" to Genoa, Vivant Denon maintained that the work "was offered as tribute to the French government from the city council of Genoa" and that transportation would endanger the work, due to its fragility.
In comparison to the other nations, the Italian cities were disorganized and without the support of a national army or diplomatic corps to make official requests. The sculptor Antonio Canova was sent by the Vatican on a diplomatic mission to the peace conference for the second Treaty of Paris in August 1815. Canova sent letters asking Wilhelm von Humboldt and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh to support the return of Italian artworks and annul the conditions of the Treaty of Tolentino. In September, Canova also met with Louis XVIII, and that audience lessened French resistance to the repatriations. By October, Austria, Prussia, and England had agreed to support Canova's efforts, which led to the return of many statues and other sculptures. The Vatican manuscripts were restored by Marino Marini, the nephew of a Vatican librarian, as well as lead type that had been seized from the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
English public opinion was generally against the French, and the Duke of Wellington wrote to Robert Stewart to intervene on behalf of the Low Countries. Not satisfied, he sent his troops to join the Prussians in the Louvre to remove the Flemish and Dutch paintings from the walls. As the "Courier" described it in October 1815:
The conditions of the 1815 Treaty of Paris required that any artworks to be returned had to be properly identified and returned to the nations they originated from. These conditions made it difficult to determine "where" some of the paintings should be sent. For example, some Flemish paintings were mistakenly returned to the Netherlands, rather than Belgium. The treaty also required effort on the part of the conquered nations for their art to be returned. The situation was only partially resolved when the British offered to finance the costs of repatriating some artworks to Italy, with the offer of 200,000 lire to Pope Pius VII.
For various reasons, including lack of money, knowledge of the theft, or appreciation for the value of the works taken, the restored allied governments did not always pursue the return of the appropriated paintings. The Austrian governor of Lombardy did not request the Lombardic artworks taken from churches, such as "The Crowning with Thorns" by Titian. Ferdinand VII of Spain refused the return of several old master paintings when they were offered by the Duke of Wellington. They were taken to London instead. The Tuscan government, under the Hapsburg-Lorraines, did not request works such as the "Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata" by Giotto, Maesta by Cimabue, or the "Coronation of the Virgin" by Beato Angelico. The ceiling paintings of the ducal palace in Venice were never requested, although Titian's "Martyrdom of Saint Peter" was. Canova never asked for 23 paintings dispersed through the French provincial museums, as a gesture of good will. The Papal government did not ask for everything—especially paintings held by French provincial museums, like many taken from Perugia—so as not to disturb the re-Catholicization of a French countryside that was recovering from Jacobinism.
The Horses of Saint Mark were returned to Venice (not Constantinople, where they were originally taken by the Venetians), after it took workers over a week to remove them from the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the streets around the Arc being blocked by Austrian dragoons to prevent any interference with the removal. The Lion of Saint Mark was dropped and broke while it was being removed from a fountain.
On 24 October 1815, after the negotiations, a convoy of 41 carriages was organized that, escorted by Prussian soldiers, traveled to Milan. From there, the artworks were distributed to their legitimate owners throughout the peninsula. In November, Lavallée reported that Spain had received 248 paintings, Austria 325, and Berlin 258 bronzes.
Legacy.
Between 1814 and 1815, the "Musée Napoleon" (the Louvre's name at the time) was dissolved. From its opening, artists and scholars had flocked to the museum to see its expansive, exhaustive collections, including Charles Lock Eastlake, Henry Fuseli, Benjamin West, Maria Cosway, and J. M. W. Turner. One English artist, Thomas Lawrence, expressed sorrow at its dissolution, despite the injustices that had led to its creation. Still, the museum's impact remained:
Art historian Wescher also pointed out that, "[The return of the stolen artworks] contributed to the creation [of an] awareness of national artistic heritages, an awareness that did not exist in the 1700s." The circulation of artworks during the Napoleonic era had actually increased the renown of artists that were otherwise unknown internationally.
After 1815, European museums were no longer just a hoard of artifacts—they were an expression of political and cultural power. The Prado in Madrid, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the National Gallery in London were all founded following the Louvre's example. The conditions of the Treaty of Paris set a nationalist precedent for future repatriations in Europe, such as that of Nazi plunder in the 20th century.
The repatriations took a long time and were incomplete; almost half of the looted artworks remained in France. As a condition for the return of the artworks, many of the works were required to be shown in a public gallery and were not necessarily returned to their original locations. For example, Perugino's "Decemviri Altarpiece" was only reinstalled in its chapel in Perugia in October 2019, although it is still incomplete. The long time it has taken to return some appropriated works in turn has become an argument "against" their restitution, particularly with museums' adoption of "retention policies" in the 19th century.
Attempts at reacquisition have continued, however, up to and including the present day. During the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck's Germany asked the France of Napoleon III to return works of art still held from the time of the looting but never repatriated. Vincenzo Peruggia described his 1911 theft of the "Mona Lisa" as an attempt to restore the painting to Italy, claiming incorrectly that the painting had been stolen by Napoleon. In 1994, the then-general director of the Italian ministry of culture, believed the conditions were right for the return of the "The Wedding at Cana" of Veronese. In 2010, the historian and Veneto official Estore Beggiatto wrote a letter to French presidential spouse Carla Bruni, urging the painting's return—the painting is still at the Louvre.
Egypt has requested the repatriation of the Rosetta Stone, which was discovered and exported to the British Museum after the French occupation of Egypt. And former Egyptian antiquities minister Zahi Hawass launched a campaign in 2019 to have the Dendera zodiac returned to Egypt. It had been removed in 1822 from the Dendera Temple complex by Sébastien Louis Saulnier after being identified by Vivant Denon in 1799.