Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece Audiobook

Quotes

• “In Charney’s hand, the story of the various heists often reads like a political thriller.”

  — Maclean’s

• A brisk tale of true-life heroism, villainy, artistry and passion.

  — Kirkus

• “Well-written and thorough, this book reminds us of the influence and fragility of art, our veniality and heroism, and the delights found in both the beautiful and the strange.”

  — Cleveland Plain Dealer

• “Action-packed…In scrupulous detail, Charney divulges the secrets of the revered painting’s past, and in doing so, gives readers a history lesson on art crime, a still-prospering black market.”

  — Christian Science Monitor

• “Charney’s wonderfully learned and entertaining book tells us about all the indignities this famous image has endured through the centuries…but the book also has some much broader point to make about the cultural significance of important paintings…Charney tackles some important subjects (the creation of the modern art-stealing industry, our sensible obsession with almost burglar-proof museums) but he wears his learning lightly and the next extraordinary tale is only ever a few pages away. Best of a very good bunch must be the account of the Monuments Men: the highly qualified people who followed in the wake of the liberating armies at the end of World War Two…It is good to hear their story and all the other bizarre tales this innovative and elegant book has to tell.”

  — Catholic Herald

• “Charney unsnarls the tangled history of Jan van Eyck’s fifteenth-century The Ghent Altarpiece (a.k.a. The Mystic Lamb), ‘the most desired and victimized object of all time.’ With a novelist’s sense of structure and tension, the author adds an easy familiarity with the techniques of oil painting and with the intertwining vines of art and political and religious history…A brisk tale of true-life heroism, villainy, artistry, and passion.”

  — Kirkus Reviews