The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.26 (638 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0375759867 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The Lost Painting reads more like a historical novel than art history, as Harr smoothly weaves several narratives together to bring the story alive. How this clue--a single entry in an old listing of family possessions--led to a residence in Ireland and the subsequent restoration of this Italian Baroque masterpiece is the subject of this brisk and enthralling detective story. Mercurial, supremely gifted, and prone to violence, Caravaggio lived like an outlaw and a pauper most of his troubled life. But most of the book is focused on more primitive methods, including dogged research through dusty archives and meticulous attention to detail. This entertaining book boasts an engaging cast of characters, all of whom are inflicted with the "Caravaggio disease," including some of the foremost Caravaggio scholars in the world, persistent students, obsessive restorers, and most of all, the artist himself. Yet even when he attained wealth and
At First Annoying and Then Enchanting Bucherwurm I really love history, and especially art history. A book about the finding of the long lost Caravaggio painting "The Taking of Christ" got me really excited. Then I started reading it. Evidently authors like Mr. Harr feel that most people won't pick up a book that is not fiction so he writes in a way that gives new meaning to the term "narrative history". At first he seems to want to write a novel. We go riding through the mountains seeing the scenery, experiencing the ocean breeze, pulling over to the side to let faster vehicles pass us by. Our brakes aren't too good, but now the roa. david maniowicz said Caravaggio, lost and recoverrd in your eyes. I enjoyed this book a lot. A good story and real facts to understand how famous paintings get to a museum. The world of caravaggio and Rome in the XVII century at your fingertips. An ideal tale for an e-book as you can easely link to each painting and check its details in real time. I also navigated to each place mentioned in the book linking to google maps, wikipedia, you tube, etc.To my surprise, the characters are also real and can be watched and heard in the web. Wonderful experience to enjoy and learn about caravaggio. baobab said Why is this a novel?. I enjoy art history, and the depiction of how modern scholars determine attribution of old paintings is interesting, but I would have preferred a factual article, not a fictional account. I don't know how much, if anything in this book is based on reality. As fiction the book doesn't have that much going for it. There is very little character development and no particular drama or suspense in the plot. On the whole I would have preferred to read a factual account.
An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. The fascinating details of Caravaggio’s strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. Harr’s account is not unlike a Caravaggio painting: vivid, deftly wrought, and enthralling."Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller rich and wonderful truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling nonfiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book,