Quattrocento [Hardcover]

James McKean (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2002

In the tradition of Time and Again, a sweeping love story/time-travel epic situated between the modern-day New York art world and fifteenth-century Tuscany.

Matt O’Brien has a quiet life: A painting restorer with a particular love of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance, he toils away millimeter by millimeter, bringing old oils to new light. But one day he happens upon a painting in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum that is thick with centuries of yellowed varnish and dust. As he uncovers the portrait of a mysterious, beautiful woman, he finds himself suffering from an urgent sense of déja vu coupled with the pain of falling in love with a person long dead. Meanwhile, strange things have been happening in the museum since the installation of a wood-paneled room from Gubbio called a studiolo. As Matt increasingly seeks refuge in this magical room from the pressures of having potentially discovered a Leonardo da Vinci, the centuries slip away and he finds himself in the center of a love triangle, with Anna on one side and the Machiavellian knight Leandro, fighting for her fortune, on the other.

Obsession and passion combust in this exotic tale that is at once contemporary and rich in period detail. Rooted in art history, music theory, and the rudiments of physics, McKean's debut novel is a mesmerizing tale of time travel and possibility. With twists and turns that are as thrilling as they are unexpected, Quattrocento is escapist storytelling at its very finest.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The thrilling aspect of this time-traveling drama guaranteed to excite any art-lover is the discovery of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci; far less moving is the obligatory romance driving the plot. Matt O'Brien, an art restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is cleaning a grimy little painting, buried under many coats of old varnish, when he realizes it may be a hitherto unrecognized Leonardo, potentially of inestimable value. The subject is a beautiful woman, whom Matt names Anna. He spirits the painting out of the museum and compares it in Washington's National Gallery to the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, the sole genuine painting by da Vinci in the country, one of the few of his oeuvre in the world. Both are painted on matching poplar wood, with comparable signature marks by the artist, but the deeper significance to Matt is Anna herself, with whose quattrocento, or early Renaissance, image he has fallen in love. So deeply in love is he, that, like other love-besotted heroes of such stories, he is whisked back to the land and time of his beloved. He discovers that Anna is a contessa, married to an elderly man and pursued by the dangerous and jealous knight, Leandro. Mostly the two discuss pigments, as Anna paints. Their passion does not go beyond a genteel kiss before Matt is returned to his own time, but with the aid of some dubious scientific rigmarole he is back in the quattrocento. Conveniently, Anna's husband has died, the knight is gone and the way is clear for love. McKean's copious descriptions and ponderous prose slow his story down to a crawl, snuffing out the few genuine sparks of painterly delight.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this debut by expert violinmaker McKean, an art restorer shattered by the realization that he may have discovered a new Leonardo finds himself drawn across the centuries into a love triangle involving the painting's subject and her knight.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (July 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385503199
• ISBN-13: 978-0385503198
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,121,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Timeless Love, August 21, 2002

By 

Alan A. Smith (Las Vegas, NV United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quattrocento (Hardcover)

Quattrocento, the first novel by luthier James N. McKean, is a thoroughly engrossing love story about an art restorer who falls in love with the fifteenth century portrait of a beautiful woman. The story, which involves time travel to fifteenth century Italy, is filled with wonderful, accurate detail about art, and gorgeous descriptions of both past and present.
McKean is clearly very knowledgeable about art and art history, and the details he provides about art and the process of creating art lend a realistic quality to the story. The book is first and foremost, however, a love story. While there is plenty of poetic and descriptive prose, yet the book moves at a fast pace and has a lot of action and suspense.
Once I started reading this book I found I could not put it down, and finished it in two days. I recommend it to anyone who has a passion for art, romance, or who simply enjoys a good read.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Perfect, But ...., November 13, 2002

By 

Cassandra_was_right "Diplomat-Writer-Mother-Cook" (Athens, Greece) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quattrocento (Hardcover)

As previous reviews note, this is not a perfect book. It is, however, a clever and beautifully written one. The way that Matt - aware of the low-key, easily-overlooked disjunctures occurring around him, but not of their import - eases without intention into his travel through time, is unique and interesting. The smooth interweaving of a wonderful amount of information about music and painting is not only necessary to the story but fascinating, and goes down very easily: no stop-and-lecture points for our hero. And the writing itself asks gently but insistently for one's full attention.

I am a high-speed devourer of books who is impatient with excess and who hates bad writing. Even with the best of books, I tend to skip lines or even paragraphs sometimes. But I might have actually read every word of this book; I did not want to miss any of the imagery and the grace of language. While reading, I was even consciously aware of doing something I do extremely rarely: slowing down deliberately in order to picture more clearly the images and ideas Mr. McKean was offering to me. And they were almost never disappointing.

In the end, I find myself left with only two concerns: first, what happened to Orlando? and second, will Mr. McKean write again? If he does, I for one will be more than ready to sample his talents again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, September 1, 2003

By 

Roderic C. Botts "Robotts" (Milwaukee, WI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Quattrocento (Hardcover)

McKean should stick to what he knows best: violinmaking! I picked the book up because the cover portrait of Leonardo's Ginerva caught my eye, having recently visited Florence and studied the quattrocento. I enjoyed the author's depiction of life on a Medici villa and the discussions about art. The time travel and the love story are both unsatisfying, however, and McKean never connects the dots at several points--there are major holes in plot development (unconnected to the time travel) that I found confusing and frustrating. At the same time, his descriptions are overwritten and overwrought. I got very tired of the leadups to the "wolf tone."