In 1794, the Napoleonic looting of Rhineland’s and Low Countries’ art collections went almost unnoticed in the contemporary German press, while that of Italian collections of classical and Renaissance art a few years later was unequivocally deemed “a tragic violation of the legacy of antiquity, and of the cherished environment where German artists and scholars had become accustomed to basking in its rays” (19). This exquisite book is about sculptures and paintings, their celebration as near “gods,” and other valuables (coins, gems), but especially their instrumentalization for political purposes. Building on Schiller’s term the “aesthetic state” (cf. Josef Chytry), Goff in fact talks about much more, showing how the very need for art history, conservation, and museology was dictated by reactions to the looting of artworks (Kunstraub)—contributing profoundly to subsequent waves of Romanticism, but also nationalism and colonialism.
Looking at both “the drama and the comedy of German cultural politics in the revolutionary period” (6), the book takes little for granted—the very meaning of art, along with the problematic history of collections, is analyzed minutely. Moving from the “universal” to the Prussian context, it constructs a framework for understanding how war inspired appreciation of locally relevant artworks. It was not only their relocation in physical space and the sadness of losing precious items that made people rethink the value of their own heritage. The subsequent exhibitions of these looted items made it possible to devise comparative art histories, which further prompted profounder considerations of their value.
Not least, however, this book is about megalomania in politics: Vivant Denon, the French museum official who oversaw the display of Napoleon's looted works, was trying to create a “universal survey museum of art” in imperial Paris (82). Goff convincingly shows how the whole center-periphery dynamic of nineteenth-century humanities was largely built on the process of dislocating and restituting artworks—not as an intellectual exercise, but as part of politics of the real world. How many of us really think of this backdrop when visiting the Louvre, the Berlin Museum Island, or “blockbuster museums” elsewhere in the world?
This book also does a good job at displaying inherent contradictions such as the degradation of art and its reduction from a capsule of nobility to an object of pragmatic logistical operations. This “god,” in short, is reduced to a piece of marble, his value comprising little more than the price of the material. At the same time, wars or revolutions have been turning points in the history of knowledge, making the spiritual, identity-making qualities of artworks ever more visible—making them come alive within their original contexts. “Were these works masters or slaves; living or dead; eternal or finite?,” Goff asks (62).
The thousands of displaced artworks certainly raised questions over ownership, accessibility, and meaning: “Could a trophy of war become the patrimony of mankind?” (77). Through statesmen like Wilhelm von Humboldt, academicians like Aloys Hirt, architects like Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and functionaries like Eberhard von Groote, we see how the Kunstraub was an occasion to instrumentalize the criteria of ideal beauty for defining the very “conditions of contemporary political freedom” (9). But how could a spoil of war inspire freedom? Much of the book is focused on the domain of arts administration—along with scholars, poets, and philosophers, Goff proposes the central actors were guards, custodians, and caretakers. Many compromises had to be made: ideal solutions do not hold in moments of crisis, chaos, or upheaval. This point not only comes to light for us as historians today, but was also present for the historical actors themselves insofar as plans were thwarted, works lost or damaged, not to mention the rise of attending misunderstandings, sabotage, and black market shenanigans.
Detailed inventories (that were often compiled in the last minute) made it possible to request the works be returned eventually, but these were also necessary for the various custodians of the works to avoid being held responsible. They often were held responsible, nonetheless, despite trying to safely evacuate their collections.
Yet the looting of art could also be seen as “an intellectually generative” experience (148): “emergent nationalist views were self-consciously forged in the very transnational cultural institutions and networks that plunder, paradoxically, enabled” (21). Despoliation made visible the effect of climate on artworks, raising new questions about conservation. And the lack of registers, in some cases, could be seen as another ground for the rise of the art historical survey book.
Goff demonstrates how German visitors’ initial cries of “vandalism” and “barbarity” in the Louvre became “less persuasive as the museum established displacement as the highest form of civilization” (85). Paris with its museums, open to all, was both an irritant and a magnet. Victory over the French, as a result, “only made it more apparent how badly the Prussians had to catch up” (194). On a critical note, the military advances themselves are oddly unmentioned, leaving the impression that Napoleon or the King of Prussia devoted full attention to museological particularities. A few words about the Louvre collection’s history before Napoleon would not have harmed either.
The book’s simultaneous discussion of Francophilia/Francophobia discourse—in all its complexity—is an enticing theme, introducing the later French-German competition in the history of art history (e.g., the true origins of the Gothic) as well as the birth of notions of heritage: “While France had made of the philosophical heritage of the eighteenth century a tool of destruction in the implementation of the new order – turning ideas into stones – Prussia would seek the reverse, turning stones into “higher ideas” and thereby enabling the creation of “the goodness of mankind” (137).
Goff shows with rare power and clarity the interwovenness of nation-building and art history. The funny episodes, predicaments, and missed ideals—the ironies of history, and life—make the past palpable. The partial restitution of the massive stone columns of Charlemagne’s Aachen Cathedral, which had been brought to the Louvre, was allegedly accompanied by fears that “compromises in the restitution effort […] could provoke a German revolution” (172). Restitution itself was made into a monument in cases like these. Reintegrated into their original settings after 1814, “these works were to stand not only as symbols, but as concrete material evidence of both the injustice of French hegemony and the munificence of Prussian liberation” (150). The spontaneous festivals celebrating the convoys of restituted objects and the theatrical spectacles organized by municipalities certainly played a significant part in establishing “a template for popular identification with a national community” (188). Let it not be forgotten that it was in this national moment of insecurity that the reconstruction of the Cologne Cathedral began.
The German “eminent tradition of European cosmopolitanism” was built on the genius of Winckelmann, this father of art history (127). Yet restitution was not merely a noble cause. The aim to create a publicly accessible collection was thought to “finally elevate Berlin to become a cultural epicenter of Europe,” sometimes at the cost of more “peripheral” owners (190).
The book ends with the German institutional-museological afterlife of Kunstraub, up to the founding of the Humboldt-Forum in the reconstructed Berlin Palace. To European readers, the topics in this section of the book are already familiar, causing the book to lose some of its charm. But, building on the work of Bénédicte Savoy and others, Goff effectively makes clear that displaced artworks are not only essential for analyzing history: they continue to affect European cultural politics. The museum has become a central object of cultural history: “it has served as a nexus in which the history of aesthetics meets institutional history; where the historiography of art meets sociology; where the history of epistemology meets the history of objects; and where the history of liberalism meets the history of everyday life” (217).
Goff similarly not only brings to the fore the indisputable politicality of art, and its connectedness to science, economy, etc., but even reveals art to be the enabler of these fields. In looking at the booming print market and its effects on this array of practices, Goff almost continues from where Benedict Anderson left off in discussing imagined communities. Additionally, she rests her claims on great findings from private correspondence and diaries. Many chapter titles are in fact borrowed from poetic quotes, but this is not always helpful for the reader: the short titles are not sufficiently revealing; the subchapter headings do not appear in the Table of Contents at all. This opacity could obscure the book’s fascinating content for some. Luckily there is a thorough index, up to entries such as “custodians,” “museum visitors,” and “restitution” by type or object.
Goff's writing is like the best kind of fiction (in Hayden White’s sense), dense with metaphors and eloquent figures of speech. She masters text and her material in a way few historians do, layer by layer, in a measured pace, in just the right balance. Each chapter tells the story via one central artwork, in a carefully composed structure, forcing the reader to solve riddles and enigmas, while maintaining the tension.
Through her way of writing, Goff returns the life to art, contemplating monuments as if they were living beings: the Laocoön group, or Hans Memling’s The Last Judgement triptych from Gdańsk (Danzig) do speak in their own voice at times. Addressing questions of cultural property, the meaning of art in the society—both art’s power and vulnerability—the author shows convincingly, how the Napoleonic Kunstraub has shaped our very understanding of—and created the basis for—the disciplines of art history, museology, or heritage preservation; that artworks moving in time and space—and the people speaking in favor of them—have motivated much of the history of the Western world.
