Napoleon was no connoisseur of art. He admired works based on their size and their lifelike naturalism. Denon gently guided Napoleon in matters of taste but was largely content to siphon off for the Louvre the works most important to the history of art, those that required greater knowledge or more subtle tastes to appreciate, leaving the large realistic paintings for Napoleon’s personal collection. Denon would accompany Napoleon on most of his later campaigns, advising on which artworks to confiscate and send to the Louvre. His nickname was
l’emballeur
, “the packer,” for his constant supervision of the packing and shipping to Paris of looted artworks.
Denon was a pocket philosopher, capable of some intriguing insights, but most often at a superficial level. He spent his time on the Napoleonic campaigns drawing monuments and occasionally sketching battles as they took place—it is said that he supported his drawing board across his saddle as he rode on horseback alongside a raging battle, sketching frantically, cannon fire all around. When the French army reached the ruined Greek city of Thebes, Denon wrote of an incident that was wonderfully romantic, if it can be believed: “[The ruined city was] a phantom so gigantic . . . that the army, coming in view of its scattered ruins, stopped of its own accord and, in one spontaneous moment, burst into applause.” He waxed poetic on the subject of war and how history can rewrite itself: “War, how brilliant you shine in history! But seen close up, how hideous you become, when history no longer hides the horror of your details.”
This line would prove prophetic: History writers deftly cleaned up the looting of art during war, as Denon did himself on 1 October 1803. On
that day, one hundred cases packed full of antiquities looted from Italy arrived at the Louvre without a single object broken en route. Denon took the opportunity to make a speech to the members of the Institut de France, an intellectual salon group with mystical/religious interests that had been established in 1795 by former members of the French Masonic Lodge. Presenting treasures that included the Venus de Medici and the Capitoline Venus, Denon proclaimed, “The hero of our century, during the torment of war, required of our enemies trophies of peace, and he has seen to their conservation.”
Denon was the first director of the Louvre, officially rising to the post in 1802. His role in art looting notwithstanding, Denon was an ingenious museum director, helping to shape the way we conceive of museums today. He thought that a museum should present a “complete set” of the best representations of every artistic movement that one could acquire, from “the Renaissance of the arts until our own time.” In this way, the museum should provide “a history course in the art of painting,” presenting its collection with “a character of order, instruction, and classification,” as Denon wrote in a letter to Napoleon in 1803. To this end, Denon rein-vented the manner of displaying paintings. Before this time, works were hung from floor to ceiling in a rather haphazard manner, covering the walls with frames. Denon came up with the idea of isolating art for better contemplation, framing each work in the center of the wall, and displaying works of art that would have an artistic or theoretical dialogue near each other. He believed that one could learn through the way that art was displayed, not merely from the art itself.
When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, Denon was made inspector general of French museums, ostensibly the director of all national collections. Both he and Napoleon understood that there was symbolic power in the capture and display of the cultural treasures of fallen nations. When he was not traveling recently conquered Europe, seizing thousands of artworks of the highest quality, Denon installed himself at the Louvre, surrounded by an art historian’s fantasy. The museum would become the Hall of Wonders, starring the jewels of the conquered world, available for the delectation of triumphant France.
The Louvre—originally known as the Muséum Français, then the Musée Central des Arts, then the Musée Napoleon from 1803 to 1814, before becoming the Musée du Louvre—developed into a popular pilgrimage point for the cultured traveler. The accumulation of looted art in Paris was a constant point of discussion in European publications and elicited a great deal of interest in what might be called “illicit art tourism.”
In 1802 Henry Milton, an Englishman traveling to Paris specifically to see the loot-stocked Louvre, wrote: “Bands of practiced robbers who could not find an outlet for their talents in their homeland were shipped abroad to commit crimes under another, less discreditable name. . . . Hordes of thieves in the form of experts and connoisseurs accompanied their armies to take possession, either by dictation or naked force, of all that seemed to them worth taking.” Milton’s indignation, a feature of his 1815 book
Letters on the Fine Arts Written from Paris,
did not prevent him from visiting and admiring the art itself. One might object in principle to a circus display of caged endangered creatures, yet buy a ticket to the show all the same.
Milton exemplified a new breed of tourist, one who traveled to Paris to admire the new and best museum in the world, comprising the choicest plunder from all of Europe. The general consensus was some balance between horror and awe. The French had done something of which past powers might only have dreamt and to which future powers, particularly the Nazis, would aspire. They had turned their national gallery into a supermuseum, containing the cream of the art of the Western world.
At the Louvre, Denon’s goal was to assemble the world’s finest, and most complete, collection of art. Napoleon was proudest of having stolen the prized
Apollo Belvedere
from the Vatican—less because of its importance as an antiquity, but because he had pried it loose from the papal collection. Denon was more interested in paintings, and now he ruled over one of the world’s most important paintings,
The Ghent Altarpiece
. But Denon was painfully aware that the stolen prize was incomplete. The Louvre displayed the glorious central panels: the glowing jewels in God the Father’s crown, the individual hairs on John the Baptist’s cascading
beard, the blood spilling into the chalice from the neck of the lamb on the altar. But Denon wondered about the wings, and Adam and Eve. Why had Citizen Barbier not confiscated them as well, eight years prior? For a true connoisseur, an incomplete masterpiece was a source of frustration, an unclosed wound. To have only the central panels of van Eyck’s masterpiece was like having Michelangelo’s
David
on display without its legs or Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
with no hair.
In 1802, finally at the reins of the Louvre, Denon sought to right this confiscation oversight. Since the 1795 annexation of the Austrian Netherlands to France, relations with Ghent were no longer such that Denon could easily arrange further thefts from the cathedral. So Denon tried another tactic—negotiation. He contacted the bishop of Ghent and mayor of the city, asking if they would sell him the wing and Adam and Eve panels, so that
The Lamb
could be whole once more, albeit in Paris.
The bishop and the mayor declined. They would not sell off a national treasure. So Denon offered a trade: paintings by Rubens, another Flemish master, in exchange for the remaining panels. They could swap one national treasure for another. But Rubens was from Antwerp, a rival city to Ghent. A neighboring masterpiece would not do. The morale of the city was linked to the maintenance of its flag—
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
. It was insult enough that the central panels had been taken. The wings at least must remain.
This was the first of several wars in which
The Ghent Altarpiece
was a prized spoil. Much of the desire to possess the painting was due to the fact that so many other people sought it, for either personal or national collections. The desirability of the artwork accrued with each high-profile incident of its capture and return. Denon sought it for the Louvre, and because of the high esteem in which he held the painting, its fame grew.
While Denon was building the Louvre through military-imposed theft, all the while portraying his efforts as noble, the city of Ghent could claim a heroic thief of its own. By the end of the eighteenth century Ghent had lost its status as an industrial and economic presence. Then a singular
event, a theft of an altogether different sort, resurrected the battered and weak city.
In 1799 the English had a brief monopoly on Europe’s cotton industry after the spinning mule, the key mechanical component of a cotton mill, was invented by Samuel Crompton. This invention made it possible to mechanically convert raw cotton into yarn, from which textiles could be made. Thanks to the spinning mule, England was the cotton leader of the Western world—a position of incredible economic value that lasted only one year.
In order to revive the flagging economy of his beloved native city, a Belgian entrepreneur named Lieven Bauwens traveled to England, stole the blueprints for a spinning mule, and smuggled them out of England and back to the continent.
From the blueprints, the first cotton mill in continental Europe was built in Paris in late 1799, breaking the short-lived English monopoly. In thanks for the efforts of its citizens on behalf of France and all its territories, Ghent was permitted to build the second cotton mill on the continent in 1800. The city that had, historically, thrived on the textile industry would do so once more. Ghent sprung from war-torn silence into an economic power, one of the most important in French-occupied territory.
Bauwens was visited by Napoleon in 1810 and awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor, for his heroism. He became a leading industrialist in the city and was even made mayor for one year. The city whose greatest treasure would be stolen again and again was resuscitated by its own daring act of theft.
That same year proved tragic for another great Belgian city. French troops occupying Bruges stripped its cathedral, Saint Donatian, of all its art, including another van Eyck masterpiece, the
Madonna with Canon van der Paele
(1436). Then they demolished the cathedral. The tomb of Jan van Eyck was destroyed along with it. The Austrian Netherlands had been a hotbed of religious passion, with the University of Louvain a Catholic stronghold. In 1789 there had been a collective dismay at the religious
reforms of Emperor Joseph II. Once the region of Bruges and Antwerp was officially annexed to France, the Directory began to enforce the French manner of public worship and monastic practices throughout the Austrian Netherlands. There was concern that the fervent Catholicism of the region could become a rallying point for rebellion against French control. Religious orders were suppressed, including the diocese of Bruges, as was the wearing of clerical garb. Many religious institutions, aside from those dedicated to teaching or caring for the ill, were closed. The diocese of Bruges was suppressed from 1794 to 1795, as the region of Bruges and Antwerp was officially annexed to France. No bishop held see there until 1834, as the region was absorbed into the nearest French bishopric.
It would take a formidable team of European military superpowers, assembled and reassembled in five different incarnations, to stop the spread of the French army and ultimately lead to the return home of the central panels of
The Ghent Altarpiece
.
In 1809 the Fifth Coalition—international powers assembled to stop Napoleon’s goal of world conquest—finally succeeded. The Coalition vastly outnumbered and outclassed Napoleon’s army, but the great general’s tactical superiority evened the playing field. He assumed direct control over his troops for the first time in years, but the Coalition swarm proved too much. By January 1814, Napoleon had lost Italy, the Rhineland, and the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands).
After successful battles against the Austrian and Prussian armies in early 1814, Napoleon’s forces were battered, and it was clear that the end was imminent. The Coalition armies entered Paris on 30 March 1814. Napoleon’s marshals deserted him in the first days of April, and on 4 April Napoleon abdicated.
In the Treaty of Fontainebleau of 11 April 1814, Napoleon was exiled to the Italian island of Elba by the victorious Fifth Coalition. In this treaty, Napoleon took particular pains to state that the art collected at the Louvre, which included both works owned by France and works looted by Napoleon, should be “respected” as “inalienable property of the Crown.” In other words, the Fifth Coalition should not be permitted to
do what Napoleon had done and “steal back” what France had looted, nor to exact art as reparations. Most of the art would remain at the Louvre. But the Duke of Wellington insisted, as Napoleon had, that art constituted a legitimate trophy of war, and much of the looted art was returned to its countries of origin (although the quick-handed English managed to sequester the Rosetta Stone for themselves).
Even the return of looted objects had a profound effect on how we understand art today. The restituted art was not reinstalled in churches, which were the major victims of looting; rather it was installed in newly established museums, with the idea that such institutions could better protect, preserve, and present a nation’s masterpieces. This was perhaps an inadvertent but potent legacy of Denon’s that is still dominant. National cultural heritage would migrate into the museum, to be displayed in a manner, though removed from its context, that would best educate the museumgoers and preserve the works themselves.
Distraught at the dissolution of his carefully curated collection, Denon resigned. In retirement, he would open up a private museum in his Paris apartment along the Quai Voltaire—a cabinet of curiosities, more a reliquary than an art gallery, which displayed everything from the moustache hairs of King Henri IV to Voltaire’s teeth to a drop of Napoleon’s blood. Through a combination of diplomatic efforts, intentional misadministration, and a lack of coordination on the part of some of the looted countries, more than half of the art looted by Napoleon and by the revolutionaries remained in the Louvre. Much of it is still there today, including seminal works like Titian’s
Crowning with Thorns
, Veronese’s
Marriage at Cana
, and yet another of van Eyck’s great works,
Madonna with Chancellor Rolin
, stolen from a church in Autun in 1800.