When his army marched into Italy he sent a list of 100 works of art to the pope and said wrap these for travel we will take them to Paris. (see the Louvre).
Napoleon had 2 archaeologists with him. He put them in charge of the Forum and other historic buildings. That is why Rome has what it has today, 220 years after he took Rome.
Prior to napoleon for centuries it was a fad in England and Germany for rich people to have Roman statues, most taken out of the Forum area. The forum is down a level from the street on the eastern side. people came by and dumped trash into the forum for centuries. The popes took stones from the Colosseum (a pagan place) for St Peters. Napoleon stopped all of that.
OK I have read every comment so far. Maybe someone will make Napoleon or Patton with no dead soldiers or animals. kind of a woke war movie. Or as Peter Sellers famously said, Gentlemen there is no fighting in the War Room (and no deaths in war).
I wouldn’t say he stopped all of that. I’d say he did it differently. I mean he still looted stuff. And, in the end, he was still a general. If the British forces had been dumb enough to field with a pyramid at their back (which would be dumb, that would get in the way of maneuvers) and he saw a tactical advantage in hitting it he probably would have. He might have had enough respect for history to complain about them putting him in that position, but a general’s job is to win and if some historical building gets blown up in the process that’s unfortunate.
Funny thing you mention the Coliseum, they historically grossly inaccurate re-enactments of battles there too. Taking real historical events and people and making “good stories” that aren’t terribly accurate out of them has a very long history. It’s literally what storytellers have done as long as there have been storytellers.