Customer Reviews

Quattrocento

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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."

I agree with the reviewers that enjoyed aspects of this imperfect novel. The problem with the physics of time travel doesn't bother me, (i) because I don't know physics and (ii) because if time travel is inherently impossible, explanations are also bound to be so. This is no more troubling to me than the standing stone "portal" used by Diana Gabaldon. I very much enjoyed the info about music and painting, as well. Most importantly, I would have preferred a longer book with a more developed story. I liked the jarring temporal disturbances, but would have liked some explanation; I also would have preferred more developed characters. Still, a good first book.

Matt works in a museum, restoring paintings. One day a picture catches his eye, and he ends up spending his time cleaning up a portrait of a woman he comes to refer to as Anna. As he works on the restoration, it becomes more and more clear that this painting is a Da Vinci. It also becomes clear, especially to Matt's girlfriend, that he has fallen in love with Anna.

When the museum realizes what Matt has discovered and puts the painting on display, Matt is devastated at the thought of so many people staring at his beloved. When he retires to an isolated part of the museum to collect himself, though, he find himself suddenly transported, to the time of swordfights, nobility, and Anna.

This book contained wonderful descriptions of art and music. I liked reading about pigmentation and the paintings he described, which came to life in my mind. However, parts of the plot were sketchy. Somehow Matt was able to travel to the exact place and time he desired, and once there was able to get the woman of his dreams to fall in love with him. Matt was able to fit in, without question, with the people of this time period, despite his many strange behaviors. Time travel stories are difficult to pull off, since they require more suspension of disbelief than other stories. This particular one had too many gaps.

Matt is an assistant curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is also an art restorer and an expert on Renaissance art. One day while browsing through storage bins in the basement of the Met he finds a painting of a young woman. He is quite taken with the painting and after studying it, and after scientific testing, realizes it is an unknown work by Leonardo Da Vinci. Working day after day to restore the masterpiece he falls in love with the young woman in the painting who he names "Anna". The new discovery is made public to the art world with much fanfare at a ceremony in the museum. Matt is now an art celebrity. Overwhelmed by this turn of events, Matt wants some moments of quiet and retires to another exhibit in the museum, the restoration of a Renaissance 'studiolo'. The money for that restoration has come from a mysterious man by the name of Klein, an expert on physics and other matters. Suddenly Matt finds himself propelled back to the Quattrocento, where he meets the beautiful Anna, and becomes involved in her life. Here things become muddled, as physics, art and the development of the well-tempered clavier become intertwined in the world of time travel. Matt unhappily finds himself returned to the modern world just as his relationship with the beautiful Anna begins to heat up. He seeks out the physicist Klein to see how he can return to the Quattrocento and his beloved Anna. But Klein has disappeared. No one has heard of him. Matt attempts to track him down in Istanbul, and Prague, and finds himself transported back to the 18th century and a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Will he be able to find his way back to Anna in the Quattrocento? That is the question. If it all sounds a bit muddled and confusing it is. But it is still fun as the reader learns about art, music and physics along the way. What does not ring true for me is the underlying love story. There is not much development of the relationship between Matt and Anna. What draws them together? To me Anna is aloof and arrogant. For three hundred pages I was hoping to find out about Da Vinci and the origin of the unknown painting of Anna, but this part of the story is dropped completely until the last line of the last page of the novel. Worth reading if you are a lover of Renaissance art.

Although McKean often does a wonderful job describing the signficance (and binding power) of art through the centuries, the mechanisms by which the protaganist travels between our world and that of the Quattrocento are weakly conceived at best. The reader is often left trying to fill in plot construction gaps that the author should have invested more time in developing. The overall result is a short novel that is at times intriguing, but ultimately unfufilling.

Expert violinmaker, McKean, ventures into new territory with his ambitious debut novel, Quattrocento - a story of fine art and love, cleverly disguised as time-travel conceit.

At the heart of the story is Matt O'Brian, an art restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who struggles with the realization that he has revealed a never before discovered quattrocento* masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci; a painting of a beautiful young woman, who O'Brian names "Anna". The painting and the subject become the focus of his obsession, and O'Brian fears its discovery, as he does not wish to be parted from it. In the meantime, the Metropolitan Museum has finished the restoration of Federico's Studiolo, an ancient study, a placeO'Brian is often drawn to for quiet reflection.

Unwilling to psychologically part with the painting that he has worked tirelessly on, O'Brian ultimately loses himself to the mysterious allure of the studiolo, and finds himself unwittingly whisked across five centuries to the quattrocento to be with the painting's beautiful subject, Anna. There he discovers she is a Contessa and also an artist, married to an elderly man. It is not long before O'Brian also encounters her dangerous suitor, a covetous knight named Leandro, who plunges the art curator into a treacherous love triangle, vying for the Contessa's affections. After falling in love and sharing their affection with a discreet kiss, Matt is parted from Anna, and is returned to present day.

O'Brian, desperate to return to Anna summons the aid of some ambiguous quantum mechanics, and is somehow jettisoned back to the quattrocento to pursue her again freely. Her elderly husband has since passed away, and most importantly the jealous suitor Leandro is (somewhat too conveniently) gone.

McKean's imaginative Quattrocento is a sprawling tale that is more fantasy than it is drama. The author's artistic background serves him well throughout the novel, as details regarding the beautiful world of art are truly breathtaking. Several passages meld "castle in the sky" whimsy and reality as O'Brian loses himself inside various art works. And yet, throughout the novel, it seems as though McKean has bitten off a bit more than he can chew with regards to physics and the idea of time travel, as the descriptions become often tedious and lack a lot of logic. But his efforts do deserve at least a nod of appreciation from art and book lovers alike.

There are some significant holes in the plot and the characters could have been more developed but, for me, that was offset by the richness of the descriptions and the wonderful dialogue. It is not a classic time-travel romance, although that is an element, but it made me think and taught me some things about art, science and music. I very much enjoyed this book, find myself still thinking about it and hoping he writes another book.

A beautiful tale, rich in both imagery and imagination. Seamlessly, it tells itself, weaving a fine tapestry of past and present, matter and mind, fact and fantasy. Even the distortion & darkness of human nature here clothes itself in grotesque finery, lifting the common above itself, and above the inevitable mud of life.