Venice took four bronze horses from Constantinople in 1204, Napoleon took them and Veronese's Wedding at Cana in 1797, and in 1815 only the horses went home

Four bronze horses from an ancient four-horse chariot stood in the Hippodrome of Constantinople by the 8th or 9th century. After the Fourth Crusade sacked the city in 1204, Doge Enrico Dandolo sent them to Venice, and they were set on the loggia of St Mark's Basilica. In 1797 Napoleon ended the Venetian Republic. A treaty he dictated on 16 May 1797 required Venice to surrender 20 paintings and 500 manuscripts. The horses went to Paris and onto the Arc du Carrousel. French workers took Paolo Veronese's Wedding at Cana, 22.2 by 32.6 feet, from the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore; the canvas tore along hidden nails, and it reached the Louvre in July 1798. After 1815 the Austrian foreign minister Metternich pressed for returns, starting with the horses, and the sculptor Antonio Canova campaigned for Italian works. The horses went back to Venice in 1815. The Louvre's director, Vivant Denon, said moving the Cana could destroy it. Ruskin's notes record that the Austrian commissioners accepted a Charles Le Brun painting of the Magdalen at the feet of Jesus in its place. The Wedding at Cana is still in the Louvre. In the early 1980s the horses were moved inside the basilica, and replicas stand on the loggia.