Wisdom and Strength

Watson takes a single Renaissance painting, Paolo Veronese's allegory Wisdom and Strength, and writes its life story, following the canvas from the moment it was commissioned to its present home. The argument is that the biography of one object can serve as a history of collecting itself: by explaining how and why the painting travelled from owner to owner, Watson assembles a group portrait of some of the richest and most powerful art patrons of the past four hundred years, beginning with the Habsburg emperor Rudolf the Second, who commissioned it, and ending with the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, whose estate owns it now. Twenty-three of the greatest collectors in history held the picture in turn, and in tracing them the book passes through war, abdication, revolution and attempted assassination, and through the private tragedies of emperors, queens, the royal dukes of France and cardinals of Italy. Along the way Watson examines the secret meanings of Renaissance allegory, the taste and domestic display of individual collectors, and the workings of the market that moved the painting between them. The claim is that a picture is never only an image, but a possession whose journey records the ambitions of those who owned it.

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• Peter Watson