and some of his Apostles, are seated in the place of honour of the centre-span of the banquet table, whilst the bride and bridegroom sit, as guests, at the far end of the table's right wing. Above the Jesus figure, a carver is carving a lamb, beneath the Jesus figure, musicians play lively music, yet, before them is an hourglass – a reference to the futility of human vanity. Moreover, despite the kitchen's continuing preparation of roasted meat, the main course of a celebratory meal, the wedding guests are eating the dessert course, which includes fruit and nuts, wine and sweet quince cheese (symbolically edible marriage); that contradiction, between kitchen and diners, indicates that the animals are symbolic and not for eating. Plunder and repatriation From the 16th to the 18th centuries, for 235 years, the painting decorated the refectory of the San Giorgio Monastery, until 11 September 1797, when soldiers of Napoleon's French Revolutionary Army plundered the painting as war booty during the Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802). To readily transport the oversized painting – from a Venetian church to a Parisian museum – the French soldiers horizontally cut and rolled up the canvas of The Wedding Feast at Cana, to later be re-assembled and re-stitched in France. In 1798, Veronese's 235-year-old painting was stored in the first floor of the Louvre Museum; five years later, in 1803, that store of looted art had become the Musée Napoléon, the personal art collection of the future Emperor of the French. In the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the repatriation of looted works of art was integral to the post–Napoleonic conciliation treaties of France with Europe. Appointed by Pope Pius VII, the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova negotiated the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) for the French repatriation of Italian works of art that Napoleon had plundered from the Papal States. Yet the chauvinist curator of the Musée Napoléon, Vivant Denon, falsely claimed that Veronese's canvas was too fragile to travel from Paris to Venice, and Canova excluded The Wedding Feast at Cana from repatriation to Italy, and, in its stead, sent to Venice the Feast at the House of Simon (1653), by Charles Le Brun. In the late 19th century, during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), The Wedding Feast at Cana was stored in a box at Brest, in Brittany. In the mid 20th century, during the