Napoleonic looting of art (French: Spoliations napoléoniennes) consisted of the confiscation of artworks and precious objects carried out by French troops and officials in the conquered territories of the French Republic and Empire, including the Italian Peninsula, Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and Central Europe. The looting began around 1794 and continued through Napoleon I's rule of France, until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 ordered the restitution of the works.

During the Napoleonic era, an unknown but immense quantity of art was acquired, destroyed, or lost through treaties, public auctions, and unsanctioned seizures. Coins and objects made of precious metals, such as the Jewel of Vicenza and the bucentaur, the Venetian state barge, were melted down for easier sale and transport, to finance French military wages. In the confusion, many artworks and manuscripts were lost in transit or broken into pieces, which were often never reunited, as occurred with the marble columns of the Aachen Cathedral.

French officials justified taking art and other objects of value as both a right of conquest and as an advancement of public education, encyclopedism, and Enlightenment ideals. These seizures redefined the right of conquest in Europe and caused a surge of interest in art and art conservation.

At the Congress of Vienna, Austria, Spain, the German states, and the United Kingdom ordered the restitution of all the removed artworks. Many were returned, but others remained in France, due to resistance from the French administration, the high costs of transport, or the risk of damage to fragile works. As not all of the artwork was returned, this campaign of French looting continues to affect European politics, museology, and national cultural identity today. Also the "finds" of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, such as the Rosetta Stone, were not concerned by the arrangement and remained in the British Museum.

After the French Revolution, the new government had to decide whether or how to nationalise artworks from churches, the fleeing nobility of the ancien régime, and the royal collections. In some cases, French iconoclasts destroyed artworks, particularly those that represented royalty or feudalism. Other works were put up for public auction to replenish the Republic's empty coffers and were bought and transported to other European collections.

With the intervention of abbot Henri Gregoire in 1794, the French revolutionary government moved to stop the vandalism and destruction of artworks by claiming them as a source of national heritage. All around France, works were placed in storage or for display in museums, like the Louvre, and enormous inventories of the confiscated works were attempted. Regional French museums resisted attempts at centralised control of their collections, but the newly instituted French Directory created commissions to encourage compliance. In many cases, this saved works of medieval or Gothic art from destruction, often through the intervention of experts like architect Alexandre Lenoir, abbot Nicolas Bergeat, and artist Louis Joseph Watteau.

From the start of the 18th century, the French people had clamoured for more public exhibitions, creating a need for new artworks and their display. And the increased collections needed new institutions to manage them. The Musée des Monuments Français, whose collection would later be transferred to the Louvre, and the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon are two prominent examples of art museums. Science museums were also founded, including the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle.

The previously disorganised Louvre collection was cataloged and structured through the work of scholars Ennio Quirino Visconti and Alexandre Lenoir. In November 1802, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte appointed Vivant Denon director of the Louvre, the museums of Versailles, and the royal castle collections due to his successes in the Egyptian campaign. Denon, known as "Napoleon's eye", continued to travel with French military expeditions to Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain to select artworks for France. He also improved the Louvre's layout and lighting to encourage holistic comparisons of the plundered artworks, reflecting new ideas in museology and countering the objections that the artworks lacked meaningful context in France. Denon "deployed flattery and duplicity" to gain further acquisitions, even against Napoleon's wishes. As a result of the Chaptal Decree in 1801, works of greater merit were selected for the Louvre, while less important works were distributed among new French provincial museums like those in Lyon or Marseille, and then to smaller museums like those in Reims, Tours, or Arles. At the same time, some Italian fine arts academies were transformed into public museums like the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.