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The looting of art in war time is nothing new, but Napoleon took it to new heights: demanding of his defeated enemies across Italy their most valuable statues and paintings. Cynthia Saltzman’s Napoleon’s Plunder tells the story of how the most magnificent works of the High Renaissance – by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian and Veronese – went on triumphant display in the Louvre. She tells Andrew Marr how Paris was transformed during this period into the art capital of Europe, and the role art played in cementing the power of the new regime after the French Revolution. One of the most extraordinary paintings taken during this time was Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, stripped from the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice in 1797. The Italian architect and presenter Francesco da Mosto considers what this theft meant to Venice’s political and cultural authority at the time. While many paintings were returned after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. But Da Mosto looks at whether a 21st century solution – a digital facsimile – installed in the original monastery means that Venice can claim to have its Veronese back home. As the former Director of three major British institutions, including the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith understands the importance and prestige of a country’s national collections. In The Art Museum In Modern Times he explores the changes that have taken place in the past century – from the architecture of the buildings to the expectation of the visitors. Where once was a mission to instruct, educate and amaze, now the emphasis is on contemplation and individual experience.Producer: Katy Hickman

What it means to be a black Christian woman in the UK is at the heart of Chine McDonald’s new book, God Is Not a White Man. Part memoir and part theological and historical study, McDonald looks back at the role the Christian faith has played over the centuries in perpetuating ideas of white supremacy. She tells Tom Sutcliffe that black women in the church have stayed silent too long. The writer Jeet Thayil re-imagines the story of the New Testament through the eyes of the women suppressed and erased from the Gospels. Names of the Women brings to life fifteen women whose importance at the Crucifixion highlights the power they once had. Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in India and was inspired to write this work by the defiance and authority of his grandmother. In 2011 when the Occupy movement set up camp around St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Canon Giles Fraser was caught between his pastoral care of the protestors, the needs of the church and the demands of the City of London. He suffered a crisis of faith and mental health. In Chosen: Lost and Found Between Christianity and Judaism, Fraser explores his own religious roots, and discovers the healing power of theology for the individual and society. Producer: Katy Hickman

The French writer Laurent Binet’s new book Civilisations is a flight of fancy re-imagining the modern world. He tells Andrew Marr that his counter-factual novel looks at what could have happened if the Vikings had made it to America, Columbus had failed, and the Incas and Aztecs had ended up fighting over the colonisation of Europe. Caroline Dodds Pennock, one of the world’s foremost historians of Mesoamerican culture, considers the experiences of Indigenous Americans (such as the Aztecs, Maya, Tupi and Algonquians) coming to Europe in the sixteenth century. She argues that these people forged the course of European civilisation, just as surely as European colonists changed America. Colonisation and empire-building are also at the forefront of Christienna Fryar’s historical research at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her work on the modern Caribbean and Britain she argues that their histories are intertwined and cannot be properly understood in isolation. Producer: Katy Hickman