These four books form the series Raub und Ruhm: Erbeutetes Erbe im Museum (reviewer's translation: Plunder and Glory: Looted Heritage in the Museum). The series is one of the fruits of a research initiative (2023-2026) headed by Beate Fricke at the University of Bern, The Inheritance of Looting: Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and in collaboration with Bern University, Bernisches Historisches Museum, and Hochschule der Künste Bern. Each book deals with a different piece of Burgunderbeute ('Burgundian booty'), artefacts thought to be taken from the army of Charles the Bold by the forces of the Swiss Cantons in the Burgundian Wars in the 1470s.

Although the battles and the booty of this conflict are important for Swiss history and identity, the Burgunderbeute is a special case of interest to art historians more generally. Both the number and quality of surviving objects which found their way to the modern Swiss museums of Bern, Basel, Fribourg, and so on, are remarkable. Adding to the interest of the Burgunderbeute is the fact that narrative and documentary evidence (chronicles and early inventories), as well as early depictions of the looted artefacts, allow us to flesh out their stories and post-looting afterlives in greater detail.

Even for events some decades after the Burgundian Wars, it is difficult for historians to connect surviving objects to specific battlefields and trace their movements through time. For example, we can only confidently identify a handful of objects as being looted in the Sack of Rome of 1527, including some of Raphael's Sistine tapestries, a Flemish altarpiece now in Cagliari cathedral, and as recently discovered by Diletta Gamberini, Michelangelo's Bacchus sculpture at the Bargello in Florence. Even in the late 17th century with the battles between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, the distinction between booty - Türkenbeute - and mere diplomatic gift or purchase might be foggy, as the recently installed permanent exhibition in the Vienna Museum is at pains to stress (opened to the public in December 2023).

The new book series is not the first literature to cover the Burgunderbeute: for instance, there was a large exhibition and accompanying catalogue published in the mid 20th century (Die Burgunderbeute und Werke burgundischer Hofkunst, 1969), and slightly earlier an inventory of Burgunderbeute artefacts, (Florens Deuchler et al., Die Burgunderbeute: Inventar der Beutestücke aus den Schlachten von Grandson, Murten und Nancy 1476/1477, 1963). Yet for all its size and literature, the questions of the Burgunderbeute are far from settled.

The series' intervention is not to simply record the phenomenon of loot in the late 15th century, but rather to focus on the problems and provenance of these booty objects from the moment of their looting onwards. These books deal with the Burgunderbeute not as a happy coincidence that preserved the court art of Charles the Bold in Switzerland, but rather as an opportunity to address the fascinating and ambivalent nature of booty itself. Even the physicality of the four books under review (with deliberately torn pages) put the loss, tendentiousness, and confusions that accompany looted artefacts in pre modernity to the front and centre of our attention.

Rather than a methodologically heavy approach, however, the series explores the Burgunderbeute through four tightly-focussed object studies. They are a diverse group: an innovative bronze cannon barrel, a large pendant of jewels, a suit of armour by Milan's most prestigious workshop (all of these are 15th century productions) and finally a much earlier gilt and gem-studded devotional image panel from Venice. The fate of each object was quite different; indeed, not all objects in the group were actually looted in the Burgundian Wars. The 'imposter' of the group, a later mis-identification of the Venetian image panel with booty, is included with good reason, since it demonstrates the importance of Burgunderbeute in Swiss national mythmaking, the desirability of loot, and the pitfalls for researchers today.

Beate Fricke begins the series with Umgeformtes Erbe: Ein burgundisches Geschützrohr ('Transformed Heritage: a Burgundian Cannon Barrel') which should be read first. The introduction to Fricke's volume serves as a prologue to the methodology and problems of premodern loot; her text deals with a very 'natural' form of war booty, a weapon. As mentioned above, the level of survival for the Burgundian booty is unusually high relative to other looting episodes in the period. However, Fricke emphasises that loss of works and of data about them is still significant. Many objects seized in the Burgundian Wars are attested in documentary evidence but have either been lost or destroyed. We know of four other cannons of the same type made for Charles the Bold, of which this one is the only survivor; the others disappeared due to their technical obsolescence. Yet, in another sense, it was the non-obsolescence, the continuing tradition of bronze armaments, that led to the emergency melting-down by the Swiss Cantons of Burgundian cannons in 1799 during the Napoleonic Wars - by which point those cannons were already about 300 years old.

On that theme, Fricke makes some corrective observations about the difficult distinction between cannons as 'military technology' and works of art. She points out that these innovative firearms were not, in fact, decisive in the Burgundian Wars (after all they belonged to the losing side). Thus, on one hand their status as 'technology' can be overstated. Yet, on the other, there are equally problems with separating the cannons from their martial and looted context, as Fricke likewise argues. Given early cannons are neither pure 'technology' nor pure 'sculpture', it is unsurprising that their meaning can slide in different directions. This not only depends on the technological advancement of military hardware at any given time, but aesthetic and scholarly priorities. Thanks to this study, it has become clear that more art historians should take up the challenge and think about this type of object, armaments, in greater depth.

In Verschollenes Erbe: Das burgundische Juwel «Drei Brüder» ('Lost Heritage: the 'Three Brothers' Burgundian Jewel'), Sasha Rossman and Andrew Sears trace the fascinating story of a well-known but no longer extant piece of jewellery, finding its way to the costumes of Elizabeth and James I of England via the Fugger banking family. The authors start their story with a mystery, the sale of the jewel into private hands in the early 16th century, some decades after its initial acquisition as loot on the field of the battle of Grandson in 1476. The document attesting to the sale explicitly describes this sale as "secret", not only because of its commercial sensitivity but because it was a controversial move to liquidate a piece of shared plunder. This is an intriguing inversion of present anxieties: the de-accession of loot had to be kept secret, whereas the circumstances of looting acquisition are often understood today as an uncomfortable truth.

The text ends with a reflection on the jewels' probable final fate (re-working into other jewellery) and points to their monetary value as the reason for their destruction. It is hard to disagree with these conclusions, though one cannot help ponder more speculatively. Would the jewels have had a different fate had they not been looted from Charles the Bold? Or rather, if they were not sold to the Fuggers, erasing their 'lootedness', might they have survived? The authors give an alluring postscript on the re-discovery of the so-called Florentiner diamond (though not a part of the 'Three Brothers' pendant) in a bank vault in 2025, a jewel legendarily connected to the Burgunderbeute. This addendum makes the point that the fortunes of loot are not all the same: unlike deliberate and recorded destruction of artefacts in the melting of metals or the stripping and dispersal of gemstones, we can never be sure that loss is final.

In Erfundenes Erbe: Eine norditalienische Rüstung ('Invented Heritage: a North-Italian Suit of Armour'), Jakob Weber considers a suit of arms manufactured in Milan in the well-known Missaglia workshop. Here the object's connection with the Burgunderbeute is based on persuasive deductions from the decoration of the armour (saltires recalling the Cross of Burgundy) and their provenance (a Milanese harness recorded in 16th century Bern is otherwise unlikely). Weber deals not only with the exhibition of the artefact and its erroneous addition of gauntlets (a common problem with arms and armour), but more importantly its reinterpretation in the 1580s into a specific suit of armour from an important figure of Swiss national history, the Duke of Zähringen, Berthold V (1160-1218), who founded Bern in 1191. In this sense the 'lootedness' of the object was lost and it became a heroes' harness, rather than something wrested from the foe: quite a different meaning. These layers of myth on top of myth, not always compatible, show what happens with loot when the value of the artefact comes from its provenance story. We might call this story intangible heritage, a kind of heritage which is subject to continual revision - something Fricke likewise points out in her introduction for the series.

Finally Susan Marti's Enteignetes Erbe: Eine venezianische Bildtafel ('Appropriated Heritage: a Venetian Panel Painting') deals with the subject of 'imposter booty': artefacts that have been perceived from an early point as booty but which were in fact not acquired in wartime. In this case, the 'booty' was really the spoils of Protestant secularisation of ecclesiastical property. The author raises the question of whether the panel can be considered a trophy of the triumph over Catholicism, and offers the hypothesis that its survival was thanks to the fact it contained no relics. The confessional question is an important one: how self-consciously were the 'spoils' of liquidated church foundations compared to the spoils of war, whether in Bern or, for example, in post-dissolution England? What might this say about the early formation of a Protestant identity?

Through these four well-chosen exemplars of booty, readers have four objects to meditate on the meaning of loot in the 15th century and beyond. Each object's specific history raises a key problem. The 'Three Brothers' draws our attention to the loss of known artefacts as well as raising questions about the meaning of loot once it enters a private context. The cannon barrel makes us think about what kinds of loot could survive while connected to their origin, in spite of becoming obsolete military technology, and the same can be said of the Missaglia armour. Finally the panel painting raises an altogether complicated question of the desirability of creating a 'looted' story for an object after the fact.

The books themselves are beautiful - indeed covetable - artefacts. Each cover takes the colour of the object at hand: its material. Anyone who has leafed through an inventory from the fifteenth or sixteenth century will know that the material an object was made of was one of its most important attributes, indeed, often it is the only thing that was recorded. Thus, the books are covered in a deep patinated grey (for bronze), a light steel, a deep blue (for sapphire), and gold. As one would hope, all the authors of the books pay close attention to the significance of materia in their discussion. With the Venetian devotional panel, Marti even points out that the destruction of artefacts to 'despoil' them of gemstones is not a trivial matter and requires knowledge of jewellery to carry out. All of the book covers are embossed with the black 'absence' of each artefact that speaks not only to the difficulties of knowing loot provenance around 1500, but also to the fact that someone's gain of spoils is always by definition another's loss. Illustrations are generally of very high quality, editing is thorough, and the books are bound in signatures.

All four books are academic in their argumentation but should be legible to a wider audience, thanks in part to a good sense of narrative pacing in each volume. Footnotes are given but only selectively for particularly important claims, which scholars will be grateful for. The four volumes should be available for purchase by the time of the upcoming virtual exhibition by the Historisches Museum Bern (2026). The four books are accompanied by a series of scholarly articles by the same authors, which are in-press at the time of writing this review. The titles can be found in the bibliographies of each volume.

Though the objects raise tempting and broad questions, the authors prefer to stick to the facts of their object studies and suggest problems to meditate on by example. They avoid theorising or speculating about unknown details of provenance or the motivation for destruction, re-work, or re-framing. This is a logical approach given the concision of the books, their presentation and their intended audiences. However, it also gives the reader space to make their own interpretation, and to anticipate these authors' and others' future work on the subject. For one thing, there are many more objects in the Burgunderbeute collection that would benefit from new studies; for another, the objects and their acquisition can now be put in the wider context of pre-modern looting.

Since around 2020, looting has become an increasingly salient topic in art history and in heritage studies, with a spate of publications on colonial loot from around 1800 onwards. Looting has long interested scholars in other disciplines, particularly military and legal historians, but treating it as more than an anomalous provenance is somewhat new. In the middle of the 2020s, we are beginning to see an interest taken in earlier, pre-modern loot. The four books reviewed here are part of that 'new-old' turn. Some comparable works on pre-modern loot are recently published, such as studies by Elsje van Kessel and Antonio Urquízar-Herrera (separately) on the circulation and reception of Iberian loot in the 16th and 17th centuries. Others, however, are in-press at time of writing, such as Guido Rebecchini's monograph on the Sack of Rome, or Francesca Borgo and Julia Vázquez's edited volume Loot and Repair.

Taking advantage of the documentary and material evidence that survives for the Burgunderbeute, the Raub and Ruhm series provides a valuable introduction in the new 'looting studies' emerging in art history, prompting engrossing questions without wading into speculation. We look forward to the authors' future work on the Burgunderbeute and, perhaps, on other histories of loot.

Alfie Robinson