I know very little about art or art history. I was a bit skeptical that I would enjoy this book, but it came highly recommended. Turns out that I found the book engrossing. Whaddaya know? Jonathan Harr writes about the finding of a Caravaggio painting that went missing for several hundred years. He makes art history, a subject I normally think dreary, into something interesting. Additionally, Harr delves fairly deeply into the people involved, bringing their personalities into the drama. Including that of Caravaggio.

The basic history is this: Caravaggio was an important Baroque painter around 1600 in Rome. He made many enemies because of a violent temper. Some of his paintings were commission by the Mattei family, a prominent and wealthy family. Around 1800 some of them were sold to an Irish nobleman. In the 200 years prior to the sale, one of those paintings, The Taking of Christ, had been misattributed in the Mattei archives as being by a minor Dutch painter. The Irish purchasers didn’t know what they had, and it got sold several times without a paper trail before ending up above the mantle in a Jesuit monastery in Dublin.

Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ

Harr tells the story of three art scholars, none of any prior renown, who managed to figure out what happened to the painting and bring it back to the world. The first two were Italian art history students who managed to get admitted to the Mattei family records when few others had. They were trying to find information on a different painting and stumbled across reverence to The Taking of Christ. From what I understand of the book, the information about the sale of the painting had already been published but wasn’t widely known. They researched the trail and traced it forward in time to an auction in 1921 but lost the breadcrumbs after that.

The third person was an art restorer and also a Caravaggio aficionado. Asked to restore a painting hanging in a local Jesuit monastery, he suspected it was the lost Caravaggio. He worked backward in time to see if it might indeed be the painting. Though with somewhat of a gap, since he and his employers didn’t reveal to the Jesuits that they suspected the painting to be a Caravaggio.

Harr transforms what are actually pretty mundane personalities into something interesting. One of the Italian students is unsure of herself and nervous. The restorer is diffident and has a defensive Napolean complex about his status. Little things come up, like the fact that pre-eminent Caravaggio scholar Denis Mahon prefers to shakes hands rather than embrace Italian style. As several of the historians involved are Italian, it became a nice little nugget to illustrate the personalities. Somehow Harr makes all of this interesting. How exactly, I don’t know. I didn’t dissect it enough to figure it out. I just enjoyed it.

A few other blogged reviews:

• Taylor, Lisa, and David
• Reading Archives
• A Book a Week
• Fyrefly’s Book Blog

Title: The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
Author: Jonathan Harr
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 264 p.
Publication date: 2005
ISBN-10: 0-375-50801-5
Subject: Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573-1610 — Criticism and interpretation
Subject: Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573-1610. Taking of Christ
Subject: Jesus Christ — Betrayal — Art
Subject: John, the Baptist, Saint — Art
Subject: Painting, Italian — Attribution
Subject: Painting — Expertising
LC classification: ND623.C26 H37 2005

The Taking of Christ, created in the early 1600s, is public domain in the United States.