The Painter of Time opens with an unknown man painting, then slowly moves in to reveal that he is an art restorer, a man with a quiet life and deeply instilled habits. Chapter Two introduces a second character, MacKenzie, a female artist, as she begins her day at the home she shares with her father. She leaves there for her first days as a fledgling art restorer at the Cloisters. Though she appears second in the book, she appears to be the protagonist.
MacKenzie soon learns that the unknown man is Anthony Batavia, a fellow restorer at the Cloisters. He appears to be in his early thirties and formerly worked with the Uffizzi in Florence. She soon notices peculiarities in his life and life style and even thinks he might be a forger as well as a restorer. There is a bit of unrequited sexual tension between them that is never fulfilled.
Chapters in the present are interspersed with chapters on the lives of various Italian painters ranging from Medieval to Renaissance (Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, Daddi, Giotto, Filippo Lippi). I enjoyed these mini-biographies which seemed fairly accurate. There is a fair amount of detail about painters, painting, methods, media, artists, and even forgeries that feel accurate to this former artist. I surmised the truth about Anthony far earlier than it was revealed, and, as far as I am concerned, the author tried too hard to conceal this secret. For me, the play between them as a couple of widely disparate backgrounds would have been a more interesting angle.
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The Painter of Time (Station Square Media, November 10, 2015) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon
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