The Wedding Feast at Cana, taken to Paris and kept

On 11 September 1797 French troops took Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana off the end wall of the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore, a Benedictine monastery in Venice. The canvas had hung there for 234 years. It is about 6.8 metres high and 9.9 metres wide, with some 130 figures, and it is the largest painting in the Louvre today.

The monks had commissioned it on 6 June 1562, for a refectory designed by Andrea Palladio. Veronese signed the receipt for his fee on 6 October 1563. The French came to Venice in May 1797, as part of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign. A treaty of 16 May made Venice pay a fine and give up twenty paintings and five hundred manuscripts chosen by the French. ARTnews, reviewing Cynthia Saltzman’s book Plunder, reports that the chemist Claude Berthollet drew up the list in about eight days, and that the Wedding Feast was number 7.

The canvas was too large to lift in one piece. The New York Review of Books, also reviewing Saltzman, reports that it tore along rows of nails hidden under the paint as workmen freed it from its stretcher. Factum Arte, which later made a copy, says the cuts can still be seen in the painting. The Louvre says only that the soldiers rolled it up and sent it to Paris, where it arrived in 1798. The Louvre lists the way it was acquired as military conquest.

In 1815, after Waterloo, the Allied powers pressed France to return the art it had taken. The Art Newspaper notes that the Horses of Saint Mark went back to Venice that December. The Veronese did not. The Louvre says most seized paintings returned to Italy, but there was a fear that the journey would damage this one. It was exchanged for a painting by Charles Le Brun, Christ in the house of Simon the Pharisee.

The reason is disputed. Dominique Vivant Denon, director of the Louvre, offered the exchange. The New York Review of Books reports that he said the Austrians might as well destroy the canvas if they tried to move it. Media’Pat, a French university heritage site, points out that the painting had already been moved after it was cut. The Louvre itself records that it was moved whole for safety in 1870 and 1939. Antonio Canova, the sculptor who acted for the Pope, wrote in October 1815 that the matter was settled before any talks and that he would never have approved it, according to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. An Italian Ministry of Culture record says the swap was always strongly deplored. ARTnews reports that the agreement leaves Venetians without a legal claim, but this is a reviewer’s reading, not a court ruling.

On 11 September 2007, exactly 210 years after the removal, a facsimile was unveiled in the Palladian refectory. The Fondazione Giorgio Cini commissioned it, and Factum Arte, a Madrid workshop, made it as a digital print on canvas after recording the original in the Louvre in late 2006. The New York Times reported a debate in Italy over whether technology can right a historical wrong. The original hangs in the Louvre’s Salle des États, facing the Mona Lisa.