The Bellini Madonna

by Elizabeth Lowry

Book Overview

Thomas Lynch was once a brilliant young art historian. Now he is a disgraced middle-aged art historian. But everything changes now that he's on the trail of a lost masterpiece: a legendary Madonna by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374110387
• ISBN13: 9780374110383
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Stylish Art Mystery

Reviewed by Enid Grabiner for Rebecca's Reads (7/09) Thomas Lynch, once a respected and gifted art historian, has a penchant for too much drinking and a fondness for young students, reducing him to disgrace among his peers. He is fired from his professorial position in a small New England college and sets off in pursuit of a fabled missing painting, that of a Bellini Madonna. In newly found letters, its provenance is attributed to a James Roper. Hoping to recover the painting and receive fame and fortune for the find, he travels to the Mawle, in the English countryside, hoping to wheedle his way into the deteriorating home of Roper's granddaughter under pretense of inventorying her art collection. As he secretly searches through the manor in hopes of finding clues, he discovers a diary providing evidence of the painting's existence and whereabouts. He becomes embroiled with provocative Anna, daughter of the frequently absent landlady, Maddalena, her young relative Vicky and a large menacing gardener. As the search continues, the reader wonders if Lynch becomes the betrayer or the betrayed? This mystery is complicated by the author through the overuse of erudite prose, compelling the average reader to have a thesaurus at hand. "The Bellini Madona" offers a very complex narrative and plot with a very unlikeable central character. This first novel by Elizabeth Lowry is not easy reading for the typical mystery enthusiast. It is rather for the lover of literature and art who is willing to put in some effort appreciate the humor and intricate story line.

Smart Gothic tragicomedy

I loved this book and it stayed with me a long time after I'd finished it. It wasn't always an easy read but that was kind of the point - I kept feeling that the style was challenging me to look at how it was written, and by doing this it was making a statement about how we see things and describe them - about art. I also felt it was definitely trying to challenge Gothic conventions, invoke the Gothic genre and then kind of tease us with it, pull the rug from under our feet, and I liked the cleverness of that. The characters were often grotesque but that was part of the whole effect. The narrator, Tom Lynch, was really intriguing. At first I found him off-putting, but as the story went along I could see his scars and what made him the way he was, and by the end he had totally won me over. That was quite something for the author to pull off I thought. I found Anna, the girl he loves, tragic but also very funny and the dialogue between them very well handled. The mix of comedy and tragedy throughout the book was actually both strange and amazingly moving. I also enjoyed the evil mother, Madalena, and kept wishing she would come back. This book actually disturbed me quite a lot because its emotions kept shifting around and I had to keep revising my view of the characters, and in that way it's a lot like life. It's a sophisticated read, a bit special, definitely not a beach book!

"Could it be that my brush with real emotion has finally killed off my aesthetic sense?"

(3.5 stars) Writing a confession and an apology to Anna Roper, and asking the reader to be judge and jury for his crimes, former professor Thomas Joseph Lynch, a fifty-year-old art historian, describes his recent three-week stay at Mawle, a crumbling British country estate which has been in the Roper family for generations. Lynch, fired from his job at a Vermont college for the sexual abuse of a student, suffers every day from DTs, and for the past ten years he has been on the trail of an undiscovered Bellini Madonna, which he believes is at Mawle, Anna Roper's country home. A colleague, Professor Ludovico Puppi, is also looking for the same painting. Mawle is as unkempt as the protagonist. Crumbling, uncared for, and lacking in modern amenities, it is a leaking mausoleum, with secret passageways, hidden rooms, and second rate paintings which Lynch is supposed to be cataloging. Anna Roper, the young owner, shows far more interest in the burly gardener than in Lynch, to whom she seems to be "an empty vessel." Vicky, a sad and lonely child of unknown parentage, also lives at Mawle. As Lynch prowls the estate, he uncovers a diary written in 1889 by James Roper, the man he believes carried the Bellini out of Italy to Mawle. Lynch's obsession with finding the lost masterpiece becomes the driving force of his life. The characters in this novel are unlikable, sometimes repulsive, and uniformly dishonest, both about their lives and about their emotions. The narrator, Lynch, tells his story in heavy, overwrought prose, with as many adjectives in a paragraph as most writers include in a chapter, and the reader sees that while he is a fine observer of natural details and has a great sensitivity to vocabulary and unique imagery, his reactions are largely mechanical (and "aesthetic"), rather than genuinely emotional. The complexities and complications of Lynch's search, which become the novel's plot, are hidden within this mass of detail, and the reader must work to discover it. It is not until the last fifty pages that the action picks up and the characters begin to become human. Though this debut novel contains elements which suggest that this is could be a gothic romp and a satire of the "aesthetic life," it is uneven. The gothic atmosphere is shattered when a female character casually utters modern obscenities, when a place is likened to a "perverse pop-up book," and when a character is told to "play ball." The "aesthetes" and academics here are so limited that it is difficult to find them humorous. As Lynch himself confesses: "I am no longer always even sure whose story I am supposed to be telling. Oh, mine, naturally, but for the first time in my life I wonder what it's worth." n Mary Whipple