Napoleonic looting of art (French: Spoliations napoléoniennes) consisted of the confiscation of artworks and precious objects carried out by French troops and officials in the conquered territories of the French Republic and Empire, including the Italian Peninsula, Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and Central Europe. The looting began around 1794 and continued through Napoleon I's rule of France, until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 ordered the restitution of the works.
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, such as the Jewel of Vicenza and the bucentaur, the Venetian state barge, 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.
At the Congress of Vienna, Austria, Spain, the German states, and the United Kingdom ordered the restitution of all the removed artworks. Many were returned, but others remained in France, due to resistance from the French administration, the high costs of transport, or the risk of damage to fragile works. As not all of the artwork was returned, this campaign of French looting continues to affect European politics, museology, and national cultural identity today. Also the "finds" of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, such as the Rosetta Stone, were not concerned by the arrangement and remained in the British Museum.
History
Background
After the French Revolution, the new government had to decide whether or how to nationalise 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 centralised control of their collections, but the newly instituted French Directory 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 Joseph Watteau.
From the start of the 18th century, the French people had clamoured for more public 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. Science museums were also founded, including the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle.
The previously disorganised Louvre collection was cataloged and structured through the work of scholars Ennio Quirino Visconti and Alexandre Lenoir. In November 1802, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte 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, and then to smaller museums like those in Reims, Tours, or Arles. At the same time, some Italian fine arts academies were transformed into public museums like the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.
The influx of paintings also coincided with renewed interest in art restoration methods, under the influence of 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 c. 1800. In 1798, the Louvre actually exhibited a painting by Pietro Perugino that was only 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 legitimise 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 Jacques-Luc Barbier-Walbonne, a Hussar lieutenant, 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." This rhetoric contrasted the republican values of revolutionary France against the European monarchies that relied on serfdom, feudalism, and exploitative colonialism to argue that other countries were incapable of properly caring for their own culture (Although, the French Republic still held Haiti as a slave colony at this time.).
Quatremère de Quincy, a student of Johann Joachim 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 Nîmes", instead of looting Rome. Although Quatremère supported centralised 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 Habsburg rule.
The Low Countries and the Rhineland
During and after their successful war against the First Coalition (1792–97), the French armies destroyed monuments, supported iconoclasm, and held art auctions of confiscated property in the Low Countries of northwestern Europe. 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 led by Hussar lieutenant Nord Jacques-Luc Barbier-Walbonne, under the advice of artist and collector Jean-Baptiste Wicar. In 1794, three paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, along with around 5,000 books from the University of Leuven, were sent from Antwerp to Paris, and the first shipment arrived in that September. The Louvre received around 200 Flemish old-master paintings: they included 55 paintings by Rubens and 18 by Rembrandt, 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:
This tribute by a vanquished power will contribute much to perpetuate the glory of the victors, and make the neighboring powers tributary of France by forcing its subjects to draw on France for useful knowledge. It is undoubtedly the least expensive tribute to extract from the conquered, the most dignifying for the great people who impose it, the most fruitful for the goodness of humanity, a goal which any good government should never lose sight of.
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 works by Rubens, 18 by Rembrandt, Jan 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 the artworks.
Italy
In Italy, the practice of using special commissions to select art for appropriation was expanded and made more systematic. The librarians of the Bibliothèque Nationale had compiled extensive lists of the Italian books they desired. The commission included scientists Claude Louis Berthollet, Pierre Claude François Daunou, and Gaspard Monge; and artists Jacques-Pierre Tinet, 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 French Directorate ordered Napoleon to transfer goods from the occupied territories in Italy to France: