The Lost Painting

Book

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

Review by Priscilla Kipp

☻☻☻☻☻

Setting:

Italy

You are on your way to Italy. You know little about art, paintings, masterpieces. Michelangelo, sure. Da Vinci, of course. Caravaggio? A missing masterpiece from the 16th century? By an artist given his due only recently, centuries after his death? And there on the book jacket flap comes the really big news: Caravaggio was not even a nice guy.

Read on. In fact, you may still be turning pages as your flight touches down in Rome. Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action, once again takes a seemingly unextraordinary news story and turns it into a gripping, taut revelation about people with smarts, greed, vanity, ambition and luck. Follow these real-life characters from Rome to the Italian seaside to London to Dublin, where…well, keep turning those pages. Along the way you will learn a lot about Italian Baroque, crime and punishment, love and hate, wealth and poverty. Not to mention the world of the humble art historian, the unacknowledged art of restoration, and the astounding paper trail that connects them all.

This is a book about Italy that has nothing to do with food or wine. Yet it will surely get you in the mood for all that while showing you around the countryside and teaching you a few things about its history that you didn’t even know you didn’t know. And that skill, come to think of it, brings you pretty close to the meaning of art.