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.

Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley was a difficult book for me to read. Not because it was bad, or because it was convoluted or anything negative really. I have a gut reaction to lying that I can’t turn off. Sitcoms on television based on one character telling a lie, and then trying to maintain the lie throughout the episode, those episodes bother me. I can’t watch them. Tom Riply does something like that in this book. It makes me want to turn my head so I don’t have to watch him squirm trying to get away. I had to put this book down several times over the last couple months since I started it.

At the beginning of the book, Tom Ripley is pulling two-bit scams on people just for the pleasure of putting one over on them. For instance, writing letters to people and convincing them they owe additional taxes (sometimes followed up with a phone call). He doesn’t collect the money. He just likes to see people pay extra.

The meat of the story starts when Herbert Greenleaf asks Tom Ripley to travel to Europe to try to convince his son Dickie Greenleaf to return to the U.S. Ripley sees a free trip and so he agrees. He eventually get to Italy, meets up with Dickie, and strikes up a friendship with Dickie and Dickie’s sort of girlfriend Marge. He gets to live on Mr. Greenleaf’s money for a bit, and then sponges off Dickie, the two of the jaunting around Italy. But Marge and Dickie soon tire of Tom, spending less and less time with him. Tom starts to resent them.

On one last trip to the Riviera, Tom’s resentment of Dickie finally spills over. Tom clubs Dickie in the back of the head while on a boating trip. Somewhat spur of the moment, but it’s something Tom has been thinking of for a while. He quickly assumes Dickie’s identity. Not just trying to pass himself off as Dickie, but becoming Dickie almost to the point he loses himself. But of course there are people who know Dickie (Marge for instance). And there is the small matter of someone finding Dickie’s body.

Highsmith does a superb job of putting you inside Tom Ripley’s head, which makes him the quintessential anti-hero. I wanted him to succeed because of where Highsmith puts the point of view, but at the same time he is despicable and I wanted him to get his. Every encounter with another character heightens the tension. Will Tom be able to pull this off? Will he convince the tourists he meets that he’s Dickie? Will he convince Marge that Dickie has decided to leave town without telling her? Every time Tom picks up a paper, will the abandoned boat and Dickie’s body be discovered? I felt Tom’s resentment, however messed up it was. I felt the fear, even as it turned to confidence as Tom manipulated himself to succeed.

This is one messed up book, and because of that it is pretty damn good.

Title: The talented Mr. Ripley
Author: Patricia Highsmith
Cover creator: Arthur Tress (photo)
Series: Ripley; 1
Imprint / publisher: Black Lizard / Vintage / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 290 p.
Publication date: September 1992 (originally 1955)
ISBN-10: 0-679-74229-8
LC classification: PS3558.I366T33 1992

I actually finished with this book last weekend but my laziness kept me from writing the blog entry until now. I’ve previously read Mary Doria Russell’s two previous novels, The Sparrow, and Children of God, so I picked up this one when I saw it on the rack. The Sparrow is one of my all time favorite science fiction novels. Children of God was a mish-mash though. A Thread of Grace falls into the latter category.

A Thread of Grace is historical fiction, set in northwestern Italy during the waning days of World War Two. Italy had surrendered to the allies, but a puppet government still ran northern Italy and the area was under German occupation. Italians sheltered Jews to a much greater extent than Germany wanted. This novel is the story of the sheltered Jews in one valley (Valdottavo).

As I’ve noted with other novels, I love the historical aspect of the tale. This episode of World War Two was something about which I was unaware. But the writing is not good. Well-researched but not good. First, way too many characters. I never built rapport with the characters because the novel jumps around them so much. Second, I would think a novel about how Italians sheltered Jews so they could survive would actually have more than one survive the book. Out of all the characters, only one makes it. Not only utterly depressing, it breaks the continuity of the story as there is very little of that thread connecting the characters and the scenes together. Third, most of the story lines for most of the characters go nowhere. I don’t know why scenes were written for their characters were written in the first person. For instance, several scenes for the German general in charge of the area were written in first person. Mostly his interaction with his underlings. But his only real connection to the story is that he’s taken hostage by Italian partisans at some point late in the book. This sort of hash is common.

On a more minor note, I disliked Russell’s attempt to give us a feel for the life of the Italian peasants by thickening their accents… in English. None of them were speaking English, so don’t thicken them by having using the stereotypical German accent in the English translation.

If you want to know about this period in World War Two, find a different book. Because the story and writing weren’t worth it.

Title: A thread of grace
Author: Mary Doria Russell
Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 430 p.
Publication date: 2005
ISBN-10: 0-375-50184-3
Subject: World War, 1939-1945 — Underground movements — Fiction
Subject: World War, 1939-1945 — Jews — Rescue — Fiction
Subject: Holocaust, Jewish (1936-1945) — Fiction
Subject: World War, 1939-1945 — Italy — Fiction
Subject: Holocaust survivors — Fiction
Subject: Jews — Italy — Fiction
LC classification: PS3568.U7667T48 2005