Michael Glover selects the best art books published so far this year
To steal or not to steal? Art and roguery have been bedfellows for centuries. Few have truly attempted it on the grand scale. Napoleon’s purloinings were so com- prehensive that he has long deserved a beans-spilling book of his own. And now he has it. Napoleon’s Plunder and the Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Saltzman (Thames & Hudson, £25; Tablet price £22.50) follows Napoleon across Europe as, in the wake of his military conquests, he plucks down from the walls of palaces, houses and churches some of the greatest European art that he can possibly steal (some pesky things proved to be a mite unbudgeable). Where did he put the stuff? In the Louvre, of course, that former palace of kings, freshly transformed into an art gallery with which any upstart emperor might wow the world.
The glorious art of the kind that Napoleon would have stolen if he could is on full display in David Ekserdjian’s The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative (Yale University Press, £60; Tablet price £54). This is the stuff that great banking dynasties could well afford to commission, costly fabrics all a-flourish, often dripping with gold leaf, and it is a surprise to realise that this is the very first time a comprehensive examination of this ravishing art form has been undertaken.
