 In 1803, the brothers went to Paris, where they studied the works on show at the Musée Napoleon at the Louvre, which had been greatly enriched through Napoleon’s looting of art from abroad.In Paris they became disciples of the romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel with whom they visited Belgium and Switzerland in 1804-5.In 1804, alarmed by the nationalisation of church property and its destruction through sales, the Boisserée brothers began to collect medieval art, motivated as much by the desire to save it as to possess it.