The Last Masterpiece is set in 1943 Italy as the Allies try to beat back the Germans and Italian Fascists. The reader meets Eva Brunner, a German photographer, who, to prevent her father from sending her little brother off to war, volunteers to go instead. Her father arranges a job for her in Florence where she begins working for the Nazis, photographing Italy’s cultural heritage and watching as it is looted and send for “safekeeping” to a series of hideaways before being taken to Hitler’s proposed Führermuseum, a cultural area for his hometown of Linz. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Josie Evans works as a secretary at the Yale Gallery in Connecticut and enlists, along with her best friend, on whim in the WACs (Women’s Army Corps. Because of her tenuous connection with the Yale Gallery, she is assigned to the MFAA (Monuments, Fine Art, and Archives), a handful of male and female art experts to try to save as much of the European art and architecture as possible.
Morelli does a good job showing both women’s desire to protect and preserve art works, despite serving on opposite sides during the second World War. She also does a good job of showing women’s involvement in the MFAA. I recently readThe Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History by Robert M. Edsel, and while The Last Masterpiece is women’s fiction, to me, it did a better job of characterizing the unrelenting hunt for precious art before the masterpieces could come to harm either through neglect or outright destruction by bombs. The art works play major roles here, with lush descriptors rather than dull lists; female MFAA members are actually primary characters rather than being footnotes, and the prose is clear, crisp, and luminous, unlike the plodding words of The Monuments Men.
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The Last Masterpiece: A Novel of World War II Italy (William Morrow Paperbacks, August 1, 2023) is available through:
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You can read my review of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History by Robert M. Edsel here.
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