Reddit mentions of The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (P.S.)

Here are a few books I can vouch for:

Bright Earth by Philip Ball. The history of art as described by a chemist. The author tells the story of the interaction between technology, science, and art all the way from prehistoric cave paintings to modern synthetic pigments. Buy this book instead of Color by Victoria Finlay, which turned out to be a frivolous travelogue. Bright Earth will change the way you think about art.

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick. This is the story of Hans Van Meegeren, a failed painter who took revenge on the art establishment by forging a fake Vermeer painting. The painting sold for a huge amount of money and was lauded as a lost masterpiece. The best part is that the painting itself, Christ at Emmaus, is complete shit and looks nothing like something Vermeer would have painted. This is one of the most bizarre episodes in all of art history.

Art Theory: An Historical Introduction by Robert Williams. It's advertised as a textbook, but it's actually not dry reading at all. The first chapter, for example, is about the ancient Greeks: Williams goes beyond the standard sources of Greek writing about art (Plato's Republic, etc.) and actually delves into passages from the Iliad that describe objects forged/bestowed by the gods, i.e. Achilles' shield, in order to deduce Greek attitudes toward the arts. He writes just as interestingly about the rest of the course of Western art history, devoting about three quarters of the book to the multiplicity of theories that arose in the modern period.