The Bellini Madonna: A Novel [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Lowry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 2009

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 Giovanni Bellini. Insinuating himself into the crumbling English manor 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 painting’s complicated provenance might provide the key—if only Lynch can manage to beat his hosts in the search.

In the end, it will be Lynch’s own vulnerable heart that betrays the betrayer. Interlaced with complex clues and hidden jokes, The Bellini Madonna reels from the lush English countryside to the sternly lovely hill towns of the Veneto, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first. It is a spectacularly original debut.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Lowry's wildly imaginative debut, Irish-born art historian Thomas Lynch is a disappointed pilgrim scholar with a brutish obsession for the perversely vital aesthetic of religious art. The book begins as Lynch, withering away at an idyllic Vermont college amid the provincial minds of fellow faculty and his own alcoholism, is sent packing after a case of sexual misconduct with a student. Crazed and inspired by his brush with bottoming out, Lynch begins a quest to find a vanished painting only he believes exists. Most of the novel takes place inside a decrepit English estate, where Lynch is a guest of the Ropers, who he suspects possess the painting. Lynch's psyche becomes increasingly entangled in the Ropers' esoteric personalities and with a family diary that he believes contains the answer to his exquisite craving for discovery. Lowry's gift for poetic precision allows her to keep her cast fresh by providing constantly new insight into their oddities, and though the novel's second half suffers from an undernourished and canned plot, the bold character work and beautiful prose are reason enough to keep reading. (May)
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From Booklist

Debauched art historian Tom Lynch is desperate to track down a long-lost Renaissance painting, an unusual portrait of the Madonna by Bellini. He has high hopes when he arrives at Mawles, an English manor still in the family of James Roper, the collector Lynch believes last owned the Madonna. But Lynch soon finds himself bewildered. The mazelike mansion seems to change shape and configuration from one day to the next, while Anna, the enticing current resident, morphs from waif to spy to captor to earth goddess. Lynch, a self-described “aesthete and egoist” with a “rapacious hunger for beauty,” is further addled by his dreamy immersion in Roper’s diary account of a sojourn in Italy, during which he meets Robert Browning and becomes engaged to an Italian aristocrat. Written in the form of a discursive, rueful confession, first-time novelist Lowry’s lapidary tale of obsession, delusion, and turpitude has a playfully Jamesian cast to its elaborate ruminations on the perfection of aesthetics versus the messiness of life. This sophisticated, parodic puzzler tells an archly entertaining tale of misdirected ardor. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (April 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374110387
• ISBN-13: 978-0374110383
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,714,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Her Master's Voice, October 7, 2009

By 

baroquemaniac (Bavaria) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bellini Madonna: A Novel (Hardcover)

At first, I thought that I had strayed into a novel by James Hamilton-Paterson (`Cooking with Fernet Branca' etc.), but I soon realized that Ms Lowry strove for much more than flippancy and was busy worshipping at the altar of a much grander deity called James, i.e., Henry James.

Thus, the book comes with much that endears Henry James to some and makes him loathsome to others, i.e., exquisitely crafted, though at times enervatingly oblique or even pretentious prose and a plot that unfolds at the utmost leisure and at times seems to be more or less treading water. There is, of course, something very un-Jamesian about the generous helpings of sex; healthy reminders that we live in a age of fewer inhibitions; though I could well have done without another variation on the perennial evergreen of Roman catholic clerics abusing children.

And though I was soon aware that the epithet`thriller' used in one of the rave reviews on the blurb is wildly off the mark, I would have wished for something more of a surprise in the course of the book's denouement. On the other hand, the atmosphere of gloom and failure pervading the last pages is undeniably impressive.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Contrived, implausible, and far too long, August 8, 2010

By 

RDG "Robert" (South Bend, IN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bellini Madonna: A Novel (Paperback)

Set aside the impossible length of the book, the endless self-flagellation of the narrator, and his implausible failure to find the Bellini Madonna he set out to discover. Lowry never makes it clear just why he should hate himself as he does. The only possible answer is thrown in at the last minute -- unfair to readers who have waded through 300+ plus pages thinking the narrative is going somewhere.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too much work to enjoy, February 23, 2010

By 

Steven Thompson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bellini Madonna: A Novel (Hardcover)

A thoroughly unlikable protagonist visits an unlikable country estate inhabited by unlikable people, looking for a lost masterpiece. The prose is deft, but way too dense. Too much detail obscures the plot, making the reading a chore. All that work for a rather unpleasant story with an unsatisfying ending. Was quite glad to be done with it.