Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is on any art historian's list of the ten most important paintings ever made. Often referred to by the subject of its central panel, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it represents the fulcrum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also the most frequently stolen artwork of all time.Since its completion in 1432, this twelve-panel oil painting has been looted in three different wars, burned, dismembered, forged, smuggled, illegally sold, censored, hidden, attacked by iconoclasts, hunted by the Nazis and Napoleon, used as a diplomatic tool, ransomed, rescued by Austrian double-agents, and stolen a total of thirteen times.
Read more
In this fast-paced, real-life thriller, art historian Noah Charney unravels the stories of each of these thefts. In the process, he illuminates the whole fascinating history of art crime, and the psychological, ideological, religious, political, and social motivations that have led many men to covet this one masterpiece above all others.
Liked Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists Shares art, nonfiction, art history -
Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures Shares art, art history, nonfiction -
The Art Detective: Fakes, Frauds, and Finds and the Search for Lost Treasures Shares art, nonfiction, art history
-
Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft Shares nonfiction, art, art history
“People who read Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece tend to reach for these next.”
-
I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Forger
-
The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
-
The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II
-
Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces
