In this work, the author follows up The Canvas (2023) with the third installment in the Big Picture trilogy. Protagonist Emma Kelly is an art recovery agent. Her current mission is to locate 70 works that were originally bequeathed to the Vatican but have since been stolen. To complicate matters, it\u2019s unclear how many of the works were authentic. If any counterfeit items manage to find their way into the Vatican\u2019s galleries, \u201cit would take centuries to restore [their] status.\u201d (What truly drives Emma is her desire to find a Raphael painting titled Portrait of a Young Man that went missing during World War II.) Emma theorizes that \u201csomeone [is] waging and winning a global smear campaign against the Vatican,\u201d even if \u201cthe city-state usually [does] a fine job creating its own bad press.\u201d The culprit behind this smear campaign seems to be related to the Medici family and \u201cpart of a conspiracy to take over\u201d the papacy. (\u201cSince money did not bestow legitimacy, they had to find other ways to promote how they wanted to be seen: art, marriages, murder.\u201d) However, the line of Medicis most people would associate with the family name ended in the 18th century; in the present day, \u201cthere are only descendants.\u201d The story kicks off the day after a terrorist bombing in Rome, one that took place at the Pantheon and was actually an attempt to kill Emma. <\/p>\n
Emma (or Emmaline, as she\u2019s known to some) is hardly a mild-mannered art history buff\u2014she lives a double life with a husband in New York and another husband in London. Her globe-hopping exploits yield a plethora of intriguing details; for instance, readers learn about something known as the \u201cFamily Pact,\u201d an agreement signed in the 1700s that prohibited great works (everything \u201cfrom the statue of David to Botticelli\u2019s Birth of Venus\u201d) from leaving Florence and helped to cement the city\u2019s importance on the world stage for centuries to come. Readers follow Emma to the museum that contains the statue of David, a place that sees some 4,000 visitors a day and also contains the Gipsoteca, a \u201chall of models, with its hundreds of sculptures and plaster models, and a few paintings.\u201d It\u2019s fascinating stuff, but Emma also has a tendency to offer descriptions of less compelling administrative tasks (\u201cI had an email from Florence Bracewell, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Met. She wanted a lunch meeting\u201d) that prove to be extraneous\u2014such material can make the narrative drag. Fortunately, the plot features plenty of elements like drones with \u201cglass-shattering missiles\u201d and attacks by \u201cone hundred-pound Giant Schnauzers\u201d to keep things lively. Taken together, the work provides pleasures beyond those of the typical thriller. Emma may have her secrets and she faces her share of danger, but the edifying, welcome emphasis on art and art history is what truly shines throughout these pages.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In this work, the author follows up The Canvas (2023) with the third installment in the Big Picture trilogy. Protagonist Emma Kelly is an art recovery agent. Her current mission is to locate 70 works that were originally bequeathed to the Vatican but have since been stolen. To complicate matters, it\u2019s unclear how many of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6882,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}