With a Gemlike Flame: A Novel of Venice and a Lost Masterpiece

by David Adams Cleveland

Common sense dictates that it simply cannot exist -- the "Leopardi Madonna," a glorious treasure by the fifteenth-century master Santi Raphael. All the reference books and reliable scholarship indicate that the painting was destroyed in 1945, when the Allies bombed a Nazi warehouse filled with looted art. Only now the Madonna has reappeared, it seems, in this stunning, original thriller that uncovers greed and treachery in the rarefied precincts of the art world. Summoned to Venice from America to view the painting, Renaissance scholar and sometime-art dealer Jordan Brooks returns to the city that had enchanted him twenty years before. As he ponders the possibility that a fake was set afire a half century earlier and the authentic work has resurfaced -- or that the actual masterpiece was lost in the conflagration and a magnificent fake has taken its place -- he also contemplates the strange and secret auction which offers him a chance to bid on the painting. Set against the backdrop of Venice in late autumn, when the timeless city's rain-swollen lagoons threaten to swamp all her treasures, the novel limns the path that lands Jordan on the doorstep of his former teacher, Giorgio Sagredo, who has compromised his ideals to sell the Madonna. It leads Jordan, too, into a horde of amoral art dealers eager to make a killing and, more fortuitously, introduces him to Katie, a young American student who has a scent for the truth and a way of turning up at the moment he needs her most.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published June 19, 2001

About the author

Writing to me is more than just telling great stories, it is a way of probing for the things that really matter to us as human beings. My characters, like all of us, are struggling to discover some kind of truth, to answer a fundamental question about themselves as they confront life’s dilemmas. Having been involved in the art world most of my life as an historian, connoisseur, and collector, I find that the visual arts inform my writing, both in terms of description, the physical setting(always a character in its own right), and the struggle artists endure to explore the world from every angle. Great art, like great literature, must never give up all its secrets: there must always be enough mystery and ambiguity to keep the thing fresh and alive. Whistler and Joseph Conrad understood this well, as do such modern greats as Richard Ford, Alice Munro, John Updike, and James Salter: the most profound art is all about conveying feeling and the sense of spiritual quest—the fluttering glimpse of the unseen at life’s ecstatic heart. As Proust knew: we exist in thrall to the spell of memory infused with the metamorphic glories of the visual world.

Reviews

[Linnea · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing style alternates between purple and dull when related to the plot of the novel, but there was enough interesting historical information on Venice--particularly from an art and architecture perspective--to make me glad I read it. The writing is better when the author is describing some of the art history of Venice. I do credit the book with encouraging me to explore the history of the Miracoli church further and making sure we saw it while in Venice. It was one of our very favorite things, yet is not in a lot of guidebooks, strangely enough.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wasn't sure for awhile whether I liked it but I figured I finish it. The whole time it was a toss up about the painting, and the people involved. It kept getting better. Had some surprises and I loved the ending!

[Riq Hoelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author attempts so much. From the start there are so many characters. There's so much description of various parts of Venice that probably most readers have never seen and probably won't be able to imagine. There are such obscure similes. How many people are familiar with what the movement of a clock flywheel is like? Probably all this is all too much for most readers.

The book should have defined the term fondamenta, which it uses so often. This is a Venetian term for the passage that runs along a stream or canal at the foot of the buildings.

Not thrilled with the protagonist, an art dealer who fancies himself James Bond, either. Maybe it is a realistic portrait of this type, though I doubt it, but he seems to have little to no redeeming features. Which character in this novel are we supposed to like? In Chapter four and have yet to find one.

The book seems at its best and most human when the Katie character is present, although there are some chapters such as 19 when the main character free associates for many pages that I think many authors would not be capable of writing.

The thriller eventually catches fire and makes you want to read it quickly to find out what will happen. It wasn't that difficult to guess what some of the secrets were, such as the identity of one of the characters, but exactly who was causing mayhem was sometimes more obscure.

The ending is sort of mysterious in the immediate sense and not all that strongly motivated in the larger sense. Why would she do that? Would she really have done that?

The book mentions so many Venetian landmarks that it should have included a map. I checked into some of the paths the characters take and at least one of them didn't make sense. Seems like they would have had to double back in order to achieve it, but they are not described as having done that.

Overall, bigger picture, the main value of this book is a look at the psychology of admiration for great works of art, the object here mainly being a fictional lost Madonna and Child by Raphael, but it could be anything. The desire to be in the presence of artistic, visual perfection and how it can overcome someone so much that they need to own it so that they can derive inspiration from it and the scruples they are willing to discard in order to make that happen.

I feel like relating the story of how I came to this book. My father, who we recently lost, gave it to me for Christmas in 2001. I believe it was the last object other than cash he ever picked out for me. He told me that he had had to spend a lot of time in the bookstore figuring out which one to get. He had never read it, but probably just looked through the covers and maybe read blurbs on the backs of books, perhaps checking a bit inside if a candidate looked likely. In the end he probably picked this book because it related to travel, Venice, history and art, and that had a lot of obscure words that probably his intellectually-oriented son might enjoy figuring out. He probably didn't even realize that the book has a lot about mentor-protege relationships that look a lot like father-son relationships. Among his many talents, my father was an excellent evaluator of things. Whether it was livestock, land, a tree, a roof, a building, art, or many other things, he could quickly tell which were the best and most worthwhile. Turns out this power did not fail him on this occasion either. We'll always miss you Dad.

[Tanya · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was the worst book I've ever read, which is really too bad... I liked the premise, which is what made me buy it. Fortunately, I only paid $0.50 for it at my library's book sale.