the Forgery of Venus
A Novel
by
Michael
Gruber
Chaz Wilmot is a
painter born outside his time. He
possesses a virtuosic command of the
techniques of the old masters. He can
paint like Leonardo, Goya,
Gainsborough—artists whose works sell
for millions—but this style of painting
is no longer popular, and he refuses to
shape his talent to fit the fashion of
the day. So Wilmot makes his living
cranking out parodies for ads and
magazine covers. A break comes when an
art dealer obtains for him a commission
to restore a Venetian palace fresco by
the eighteenth-century master Tiepolo,
for a disreputable Italian businessman.
Once there, Wilmot discovers that it is
not a restoration but a re-creation,
indeed a forgery. At first skeptical of
the job, he then throws himself into the
creative challenge and does the job
brilliantly. No one can tell the modern
work from something done more than two
hundred years ago.
This feat attracts the attention of
Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark
past and shadier present who becomes
Wilmot's friend and patron. Wilmot is
suddenly working with a fervor he hasn't
felt in years, but his burst of creative
activity is accompanied by strange
interludes: Without warning, he finds
himself reliving moments from his
past—not as memories but as if
they are happening all over again. Soon,
it is no longer his own past he's
revisiting; he believes he can travel
back to the seventeenth century, where
he lived as the Spanish artist Diego
Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez, one of the
most famous painters in history. Wilmot
begins to fantasize that as Velázquez,
he has created a masterpiece, a stunning
portrait of a nude. When the painting
actually turns up, he doesn't know if he
painted it or if he imagined the whole
thing.
Little by little, Wilmot enters a mirror
house of illusions and hallucinations
that propels him into a secret world of
gangsters, greed, and murder, with his
mystery patron at the center of it all,
either as the mastermind behind a plot
to forge a painting worth hundreds of
millions, or as the man who will save
Wilmot from obscurity and madness.
In Chaz Wilmot, we meet the rarest breed
of literary hero, one for whom the
reader feels almost personally
responsible. By turns brutally honest
and self-deceptive, scornful of the
world while yearning to make his mark on
it, Wilmot comes astonishingly alive for
the reader, and his perilous journey
toward the truth becomes our own.
The Forgery of Venus, a blend of
erudition, unflagging narrative brio,
and emotional depth, brings us
inexorably toward the intersection where
genius and insanity collide.
Miraculously inventive, this book
cements Gruber's reputation as one of
the most imaginative and gifted writers
of our time.
Praise for The Forgery of Venus
"Gruber writes passionately and
knowledgeably about art and its
history-and he writes brilliantly about
the shadowy lines that blur reality and
unreality. Fans of intelligent, literate
thrillers will be well rewarded."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Irrisistible. Fast, frightening and,
as usual, richly imagined."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"Gruber is on a roll. Not even a year
after The Book of Air and Shadows, he
delivers another terrific art-historical
thriller. . . . It’s a tale within a
tale within a tale, a perfect place to
get lost for a few days. Once again,
Gruber mines a popular vein and strikes
gold."
—Booklist
About the Author
Michael Gruber
New York Times bestselling author
Michael Gruber is the author of five
acclaimed novels. He lives in Seattle.
Learn more about Michael Gruber by
clicking here
