The Lost Painting

By Jonathan Harr,

Book cover of The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece

Book description

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. 

An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Lost Painting as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Harr is best known for his blockbuster legal thriller A Civil Action, but the work that has stuck with me is his 2005 follow-up about a high-stakes quest to find a lost masterpiece by the Renaissance master Caravaggio.

Stretching from a hilltop village on the Adriatic Sea to the alleyways of Rome to an unexpected discovery in a dusty old house in Ireland, The Lost Painting taught me that a single incredible object—in this case, Caraggio’s extraordinary The Taking of Christ – can be the central character of a book, taking readers across centuries and from one exotic…

From Joel's list on nonfiction on international capers.

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