The Painted Prophecies of Cornelis Van Haarlem

Painted Prophecies fleshes out the elusive sixteenth-century Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem and clothes him in humanist complexity as no art historian has dared to do.In this true story, a lost work, Single Combat of 1594, lands in the hands of an Iranian-American. Less the hound after the fox than the unlikely champion on an authentication quest beset by obstacles, the new owner pries apart reason and passion to decode his discoveries. Armed with forensic analyses, an insatiable...
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Painted Prophecies fleshes out the elusive sixteenth-century Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem and clothes him in humanist complexity as no art historian has dared to do.In this true story, a lost work, Single Combat of 1594, lands in the hands of an Iranian-American. Less the hound after the fox than the unlikely champion on an authentication quest beset by obstacles, the new owner pries apart reason and passion to decode his discoveries. Armed with forensic analyses, an insatiable curiosity, and a fierce battle scene as his Rosetta Stone, he dives deep into the interiors of a brotherhood that included Bellini, da Vinci, and Caravaggio, a world of improbable, seemingly impossible and deliciously illimitable knowledge kept hidden for centuries.His was a time when the price for political and religious dissent was your head. How Cornelis ingeniously embedded secrets into his paintings is the "reading stone" that sharpens our focus behind the seen and permits us glimpses into his mysterious perspective with profound consequences for generations to come. Cornelis read the cosmic writing on the wall. What would he, what could he do with it? The tyranny, executions, and starvation he survived during one of Europe's most dramatic political and religious metamorphoses ground the lens that magnified the sex, lust, deception, greed, and violence of his compositions, and the extraordinary gift no one knew was his, until now.