Today's selections have an art history theme that run the gamut from biographies to fiction thrillers, and take the reader from Renaissance Italy to the rainy streets of Zurich.
"The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous and iconic images of the Italian Renaissance. It has been reproduced numerous times, from refrigerator magnets to prints gracing the dining room walls in our own homes. Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper weaves together the process of the painting's planning and execution on the wall of a monastery in Milan with political intrigues of the Milanese court and shares with the reader little-known facts. For example, the commission was given to Leonardo as a consolation prize when the bronze for a sculpture he was to make was instead used to make cannons.
King also examines the figure of St John and gently pokes fun at Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, whose characters claim that it is actually the figure of Mary Magdalene. After completing his preeminent work, Da Vinci lived out his final years in France.
Published in 2003, The Da Vinci Code has been translated from English into 44 languages and was made into the 2006 film of the same name starring Tom Hanks. This is the second book in his series featuring the character Robert Langdon. A prominent symbologist, Langdon is called by the Paris police for his assistance in the murder investigation of a museum curator. The body is found in a gallery before a Da Vinci drawing and paintings. Before long, Langdon finds himself chased by assailants from secret societies and the Catholic church while trying to follow a trail of clues. Brown mentions many different works of art and historical buildings, which makes the special illustrated edition an even more intriguing read.
Sadly, few of Da Vinci's works remain in existence for various reasons, though one of his celebrated contemporaries, Raphael, was much more prolific. The painter Raphael left a legacy of art to the world and a mystery surrounding one of his works is the genesis of the story of The Raphael Affair by Iain Pears. Art historian Jonathan Argyll has been caught trying to break into a church in Rome and the case is assigned to Flavia di Stefano, an investigator with the polizia's art theft squad. Argyll claims the church has a lost Raphael hidden beneath the paint of another work but the picture vanishes, only to turn up in the hands of a British dealer. It's up to di Stefano and Argyll to solve the case while staying alive. The Raphael Affair is the first book of Pears' Jonathan Argyll series.
Another lost Raphael makes an appearance in Daniel Silva's The English Assassin, which is Silva's second novel featuring Gabriel Allon. Art restorer Mario Delvecchio has received a commission to restore the "Portrait of a Young Man" in Zurich. When he arrives in Zurich to start work, he finds instructions and security codes to enter his patron's residence but as he examines the painting, he realizes the carpet he is standing on is soaked in blood. Delvecchio, a.k.a. Gabriel Allon, Israeli spy and assassin, finds himself accused of murder and battling a foe that he helped train. The real "Portrait of a Young Man" was stolen by the Nazis in Poland and disappeared for nearly 70 years. It was featured prominently in a 1996 Simpsons episode and in 2012, the Polish government announced that it had been located in an undisclosed bank vault, but as yet as not been returned to the museum from which it was stolen.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every other Wednesday during the summer, weekly the rest of the year. Dennis Neumann is a librarian at the Terry Fox Library in Port Coquitlam.
