Show Notes
In 1432, Jan and Hubert van Eyck completed a painting so revolutionary it changed art forever. The Ghent Altarpiece introduced techniques no one had seen before—translucent oil glazes, luminous depth, obsessive detail. It was made for one chapel in one Belgian city. But because it was so brilliant, everyone else decided they deserved it too. Over the next six centuries, the Ghent Altarpiece became the most stolen artwork in history. Fourteen thefts. And almost every time, the thief had the same justification: we're not stealing it, we're saving it. Napoleon took it to Paris in 1794, calling it cultural liberation. During World War I, Canon Gabriel Van den Gheyn coordinated a secret network to hide it from German occupiers, scattering panels across Belgium and lying about their location. He was a hero. He saved the painting. But here's the complication: Van den Gheyn used the exact same logic the thieves did. Protection. Safeguarding. Keeping it from people who would misuse it. Diving into the first thefts, from its inception up until World War I, this episode explores how the language of protection becomes indistinguishable from the language of theft—and how a masterpiece survived centuries of people who loved it enough to take it Perfect for listeners interested in: art history podcasts, art theft stories, Napoleon history, WWI history, museum ethics, European history, stolen art, art world scandals
More from Verso: An Art History Podcast
Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid was sold as an ancient Roman sculpture. There was just one problem: it wasn’t ancient. In 1496, the young Michelangelo became entangled in a deception involving an art dealer, a powerful cardinal, and the Renaissance obsession with antiquity. He went to Rome and tried to recover his sculpture. He failed—but the affair introduced him to patrons who could change his career, provided he could deliver on their expectations. Before the David and the Sistine Chapel, this lost sculpture helped open doors. This episode follows the Sleeping Cupid scandal, the connections behind Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Pietà, and Isabella d’Este, the collector who eventually wanted the Cupid, knowing exactly who had made it. Explore the story further in the companion Verso Dossier, with a timeline, a guide to the players, sleeping Cupids across the centuries, and rabbit holes into Renaissance forgery and Charles I’s art collection. Available to paid subscribers only on Substack.
How did a relatively unknown pharaoh become one of the most recognizable figures in the world—and help change what modernity looked like? When Howard Carter’s team discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the West was already fascinated by ancient Egypt. But the tomb gave that fascination a new protagonist, a stream of astonishing photographs and the suspense of a story unfolding one sealed door at a time. Soon, “King Tut” was appearing everywhere from Cartier jewelry and Art Deco movie palaces to perfume bottles, novelty songs and crates of California lemons. In this episode, we follow Tutankhamun through two very different lives: his brief reign in ancient Egypt and the strange modern afterlife created for him by archaeologists, photographers, newspapers, designers, advertisers, Egyptian nationalists and museums. Along the way, we look at how the discovery transformed an existing Egyptomania into a global craze—and what disappeared when one young king became the face of an entire civilization.
Albert Barnes spent decades building an institution that was never supposed to become an ordinary museum. After his death, the collection stayed together—but the Foundation around it changed dramatically. This episode follows the battles over Barnes’s rules, the people who inherited them, and the eventual move from Merion to downtown Philadelphia. It asks a larger question: when we preserve a legacy, are we preserving the objects themselves—or the ideas, systems, and values that gave them meaning in the first place?
In 1914, Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky showed work in the same building in Malmö. He had five paintings in the grand galleries and a reviewer comparing them to bacteria. She had one conventional landscape in a women's section near the fire exit, and ten enormous abstract canvases she'd finished seven years earlier sitting somewhere else entirely. A century later, that coincidence has turned into a contest: the Swedish mystic who got there first, and the well-connected man who took the credit. But af Klint never used the word abstract, Kandinsky spent years insisting he wasn't ready to abandon the visible world, and nobody in 1912 could agree on what to call any of it. This episode is about what af Klint actually made and who helped her make it, the twenty years she spent trying to find an audience for it, and why the story of a new idea always seems to need one name attached. Featuring séances in Stockholm, a museum that fit inside a suitcase, a conference in London where almost nothing happened, and the question of what we close off when we hand her the title we took from him. Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod
In 1884, John Singer Sargent unveiled a portrait at the Paris Salon that he was certain would make him the most celebrated painter in France. Instead, a single fallen shoulder strap turned into the scandal of the season, and the room laughed at both the artist and his sitter. The woman in the black dress was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a New Orleans–born Creole beauty who had spent nearly her whole life in Paris and was still described in the papers as American. Sargent was an American too, born in Italy, raised nowhere in particular, and equally desperate to be claimed by a French art world that would never quite claim him. They staked their reputations on the same canvas. Then their paths split. Sargent lost commissions, fled to London, and was back on top within five years. Amélie commissioned portrait after portrait trying to replace the image that had defined her, and watched Paris stop caring. The painting that ruined her made him, and by the time it reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916, her name had been removed from it entirely. This episode covers the Paris Salon of 1884, the professional beauties of the Third Republic, the nineteenth-century debate over cosmetics and artifice, and what happens when two outsiders take the same risk and only one of them is allowed to recover from it.