Looting as Policy

Specialized commissioners traveled with the army to pick the finest works from every territory it occupied. The Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön Group, and hundreds of Italian masterpieces were crated up and shipped to Paris. Art theft wasn't a side effect of conquest — it was explicit policy, written into peace treaties.

At the ceremony, Napoleon really did take the crown and place it on his own head before crowning Josephine. But David's finished painting (the Louvre's Le Sacre) doesn't show that moment — it depicts Napoleon crowning the kneeling Josephine instead. David first sketched the self-coronation, then changed it on a colleague's advice precisely to soften the look of arrogance, recasting the emperor as a chivalrous "French knight" sharing his glory with his wife. A faint underdrawing of the original self-crowning gesture is still visible on the canvas.