Books: Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity until the Present Day

We don’t know whether Adam and Eve grabbed a handful or even a barrow-load of spoils when they departed though the garden gates to a life in exile – a snakeskin handbag? A box of apples?

What is apparent from this engaging book is that everybody who had a chance has taken it. Sometimes this meant building little private stashes – rings, sculpture, fragments of carpet and coins – kept hidden from both the conquered and conqueror.

Sometimes it meant creating equally secret but far more significant art collections stolen in the fog and confusion of war from state ownership or grabbed illegally from private collections.

Greed, revenge and war

Art dealer Ivan Lindsay begins his full and detailed story of looting and theft and what was often described as the spoliation of war, not at those garden gates but with Sargon the Great, the creator of the Mesopotamian empire, which he ruled from 721BC-750BC. It ends, no, sadly, it never ends – the book is a sorry tale of greed, revenge, wars and tyranny.

Large empires, be they Persian, Greek or Roman, were voracious consumers of cash, taking their toll of exchequers. Lindsay rightly points out that in the days of the Sargon and in the centuries that followed, the main, though not the exclusive, object of looting was to maintain the victor’s treasuries.

Looting by demand

Art per se had little of the financial value that it possesses today. Spoils were measured more in quantities of gold and silver than quality.

The numbers are frequently staggering, Alexander the Great removed 4,500 tonnes of gold from three Persian treasuries. Queen Christina of Sweden stole 1,000 paintings from the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II.

Nazi Germany stripped an estimated 20% of the artwork in the galleries and museums in the countries it occupied. Napoleon, whom Lindsay describes as the greatest looter of all time, had Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana cut in two so that this one-and-a-half-tonne painting could be hauled to Paris. Then when it didn’t fit its allocated space, he ordered it to be burnt. (It wasn’t.)

Ironically, it is also a story of a love and appreciation of art and learning. By the 16th century, looting was more focused – less of the slash and burn, more looting by demand. Queen Christina sought to build a national library through looting and confiscation.

Napoleon wanted to make the Louvre the greatest museum in the world. Hitler attempted to do the same in his Austrian hometown of Linz. At the height of these ambitions, wagons laden with art criss-crossed Europe to hiding places in salt mines, castles and hidden vaults.

Energetic research

Lindsay continues his study beyond the end of the second world war, noting that art theft continues to grow. The Art Loss Register now lists more than 180,000 stolen items – including 167 paintings by Renoir, 569 by Picasso and 182 by Warhol.

Questions of ownership rumble on, with the Jewish community fighting for the restitution of artworks looted by the Nazis in the run-up to the second world war and during the war itself.

What about Britain, I hear you cry. Lindsay takes a cautious and diplomatic view of both the Elgin marbles and the Benin bronzes. (He obviously has a soft spot for Harry Rawson, who oversaw the British Benin expedition of 1897.)

And there is a fascinating chapter about the dispersal of the king’s collection during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, although I remain to be convinced that this is looting or theft in the same way as other examples in the book.

In the preface, Lindsay writes that his aim is to present an alternative history of the western world. He has not done that but he has produced a thought-provoking book, packed with the fruits of energetic research.

Sometimes paragraphs do carry too much information but, that said, just to be contrary, it would have been good to have a little more about the wider world – India, long struggling against the temple art thief, Japan and China. As is so often the case, Loot is a Eurocentric book.

But this is a small quibble. Loot gives us much to think about just as it is.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant