The Forgery of Venus

A Novel

No cover

Michael Gruber, Gruber, Michael: The Forgery of Venus (Hardcover, 2008, William Morrow)

Hardcover, 336 pages

English language

Published April 1, 2008 by William Morrow.

ISBN:
978-0-06-087448-3
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OCLC Number:
156822804

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4 stars (2 reviews)

Chaz Wilmot is a painter born outside his time. He possesses a virtuosic command of the techniques of the old masters. He can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough—artists whose works sell for millions—but this style of painting is no longer popular, and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. So Wilmot makes his living cranking out parodies for ads and magazine covers. A break comes when an art dealer obtains for him a commission to restore a Venetian palace fresco by the eighteenth-century master Tiepolo, for a disreputable Italian businessman. Once there, Wilmot discovers that it is not a restoration but a re-creation, indeed a forgery. At first skeptical of the job, he then throws himself into the creative challenge and does the job brilliantly. No one can tell the modern work from something done more than two hundred years ago.This feat attracts the …

2 editions

Review of 'The Forgery of Venus' on 'GoodReads'

5 stars

I read this over the weekend. I bought it back at the start of February when I read this piece from The Magnet about the author: themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-24-subscriber-only-content - I highly recommend reading this piece, as Michael Gruber is a fascinating individual himself with several careers before he started writing thrillers!

I found The Forgery of Venus as close to un-put-down-able as I ever find a book. It is "a literary thriller about a questionably insane artist who gets involved in the underground crime world of art forgery" (from The Magnet article linked above). There's a tremendous amount of art history included, but in such a manner as to be highly descriptive and very enjoyable. I actually pulled over a mobile device and looked up some of the artworks while reading about them, because the writing was so compelling.

I'm heading off to buy The Book of Air and Shadows now.

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rated it

3 stars

Subjects

  • Fiction
  • Fiction - Espionage / Thriller
  • Mystery/Suspense
  • Suspense
  • Fiction / Suspense