The Bellini Madonna Author:Elizabeth Lowry Thomas Lynch was once a brilliant young art historian. Now he is a disgraced middle-aged art historian, overly fond of the bottle and of his fresh young students. — But everything will change now that he's on the trail of a lost masterpiece, a legendary Madonna by the Italian master Bellini. Insinuating himself into the crumbling English mano... more »r house where the painting may be concealed, Lynch attempts to gull the eccentric and perversely beautiful women who live there -- though he himself seems to be the pawn in this elaborate game. A Victorian diary that draws Robert Browning into the complicated provenance might provide the key, if Lynch can only manage to beat his hosts in the search.
Interlaced with complex clues and hidden jokes, the novel reels from the lush English countryside to the sternly lovely hill towns of the Veneto, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first. The Bellini Madonna is a spectacularly original debut.« less