Stealing the Mystic Lamb (16 page)

In July 1795, after orchestrating over a year of bloodshed, Maximilien Robespierre was executed, and the Reign of Terror came to an end. The running of the Republic was transferred to the Directory, formed by a new constitution on 27 September 1795.

Meanwhile, there was a good deal of rationalizing in print over the looting that was taking place. As the army conquered and stripped the
treasures of Italy, an art student named Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy published a seventy-four-page pamphlet in opposition to the looting of Rome, arguing that art was only properly appreciated in situ, in its native surroundings. De Quincy bravely petitioned the Directory to desist, saying that Europe was one great nation where art was concerned, and that art should serve to unite. Forty-three artists and eight members of the Academy of Fine Arts signed the petition.

The Directory responded on 3 October 1796 with a publication in the official government newspaper,
Le Moniteur
: “If we demand the assembly of masterpieces in Paris, it is for the honor and glory of France and for the love we feel for those very artworks.” In other words, we like them and want them for ourselves—end of discussion. To speak out against the looting was, according to the Directory, unpatriotic.
Le Moniteur
continued: “We form our taste precisely by long acquaintance with the true and the beautiful. The Romans, once uneducated, began to educate themselves by transplanting the works of conquered Greece to their own country. We follow their example when we exploit our conquests and carry off from Italy whatever serves to stimulate our imagination.”

Thus “transplanting” became the preferred euphemism for stealing art. If Rome, the exemplar of empire, did it, then so could France. Only a few years later, Napoleon would declare himself emperor in his attempt to retake for France the extent of the former Roman Empire.

If Napoleon’s road towards empire was paved with military success, it was signposted with looted art. On 27 March 1796 the bold young Corsican general became commander in chief of the French Republican army in Italy. He was charged with driving the Austrians and their allies out of the country and defeating the papal armies. The Republican army was in a dreadful state. It had relied on forced contributions from occupied territories to supply its upkeep and payment. At the time of Napoleon’s arrival, the soldiers had received no pay for months. In order to avoid a
mutiny, Napoleon sanctioned looting as a method of payment for the upkeep of the army.

Napoleon was calculating and precise. He did his best to control the looting of his soldiery. In an order on 22 April 1796, Napoleon stated: “The Commander-in-Chief commends the army for its bravery and for the victories it has wrested from the enemy day after day. He sees with horror, however, the dreadful looting committed by pathetic individuals who only join their units when the fighting is over, because they have been busy looting.” The soldiers paid little heed. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon issued another order: “The Commander in Chief is informed that in spite of repeated orders, looting in the army continues, and houses in the countryside are stripped,” that any soldier found looting would be shot, and that no objects could be confiscated without written permission of specified authorities. Napoleon, not his soldiers, would be permitted to loot.

Napoleon managed to turn around a disastrous campaign in Italy and transform a disheveled, hungry, mutinous mass of soldiers into a disciplined, professional army. The Republican army became his diehard supporters. His phenomenal success in the Italy campaign featured a telling armistice with the defeated Duke of Modena. Among the conditions of the armistice, signed 17 May 1796, was written, “The Duke of Modena undertakes to hand over twenty pictures. They will be selected by commissioners sent for that purpose from among the pictures in his gallery and realm.” This set a precedent for payment and reparations in the form of artworks that would enrage and dismay surrendering peoples for centuries to come.

Napoleon gave strict instructions on the proper removal of artworks. Special agents were ordered to use the army to commandeer art, arrange transport to France, and make a precise inventory. This inventory was to be presented to the army commander and the government attaché to the army. Records of each confiscation were to be made in the presence of a French army-recognized official. Army transport was to be used to bring loot back to France, and the army was to cover the costs. In fact, these
careful instructions served to veil the personal circumvention of them by Napoleon and his officers.

The coyly named Commission of Arts and Sciences was led by an artist, Citizen Tinet, and consisted of a mathematician, Citizen Monge, a botanist called Citizen Thouin, and another painter, Citizen Wicar—the most notorious of the lot, who proved to be a thief for the ages.

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar was an artist and art collector in his private life. He studied under the leading painter of French Neoclassicism, Jacques-Louis David, a master whose importance to the history of painting is but one strata down from van Eyck’s and who managed his politics well enough to be the favorite of both the revolutionaries and Napoleon. Wicar accompanied the great David on a Grand Tour to Rome in 1784 and returned to reside there from 1787 to 1793. This proved a good opportunity to identify works throughout the city that would look nice in the Louvre—and in his bedroom, should the opportunity arise.

In 1794 Wicar was appointed keeper of antiquities at the Louvre, a powerful position, second only to the new museum’s director. That same year, Wicar was called on to lead the Commission of Arts and Sciences during the Italian campaign, in charge of art confiscation in the wake of Napoleonic victories. Wicar would retire from official service in 1800 and move to Rome permanently, where he set up shop as a highly successful portraitist, sought out by Grand Tourists, and as a dealer in stolen drawings. There he was at leisure to admire the city that he had helped Napoleon to pillage—and a good portion of the plunder remained in his apartment, gathered for private delectation but also for sale, if the price was right.

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.