Stealing the Mystic Lamb
The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece
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Narrated by:
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John Allen Nelson
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By:
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Noah Charney
About this listen
Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is on any art historian's list of the 10 most important paintings ever made. Often referred to by the subject of its central panel, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it represents the fulcrum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also the most frequently stolen artwork of all time.
Since its completion in 1432, this 12-panel oil painting has been looted in three different wars, burned, dismembered, forged, smuggled, illegally sold, censored, hidden, attacked by iconoclasts, hunted by the Nazis and Napoleon, used as a diplomatic tool, ransomed, rescued by Austrian double-agents, and stolen a total of 13 times. In this fast-paced, real-life thriller, art historian Noah Charney unravels the stories of each of these thefts. In the process, he illuminates the whole fascinating history of art crime and the psychological, ideological, religious, political, and social motivations that have led many men to covet this one masterpiece above all others.
©2010 Noah Charney (P)2010 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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In 1939, a team of workers beneath the Vatican unearthed an early Christian grave. This surprising discovery launched a secret quest that would last decades a quest to discover the long-lost burial place of the Apostle Peter. From earliest times, Christian tradition held that Peter, a lowly fisherman from Galilee, whom Christ made leader of his church was executed in Rome by Emperor Nero and buried on Vatican Hill. But his tomb had been lost to history. Now, funded anonymously by a wealthy American, a small army of workers embarked on the dig of a lifetime.
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Great narrator
- By Fran on 09-10-18
By: John O'Neill, and others
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Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
- By: Ross King
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Abridged
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In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. During the four extraordinary years that Michelangelo spent laboring over the ceiling, power politics and personal rivalries swirled around him. He battled ill health, financial and family difficulties, inadequate knowledge of the art of fresco, and the Pope's impatience - a history that is more compelling than most novels.
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History brought to life!
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The Medici
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Overall
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Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence as well as the Italian Renaissance, which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Interwoven into the narrative are the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola.
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Fun Story Bad History
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The Hidden History of the Knights Templar
- The Church's Oldest Conspiracy
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The Knights Templar existed officially for less than 200 years. Founded to protect pilgrims who were travelling through the Holy Lands, their rise to power was sudden. They became some of the most feared warriors in the region, they had a mandate from God, they controlled perhaps the world's first real banking system, and they waged war against anyone who tried to wrestle Christianity and seize holy grounds from the control of the Catholic Church.
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Insightful
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The Orpheus Clock
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Performance
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Story
The Gutmanns, as they were known, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives.
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A Masterpiece of 21st Century History
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By: Simon Goodman
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The Judgment of Paris
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- Narrated by: Tristan Layton
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While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amid scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been, at its inception, quite so controversial.
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Try this!
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By: Ross King
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God's Jury
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The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826-the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.
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A balanced review based on new material
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The Buried Book
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One day in 1872, self-taught Assyriologist George Smith was sifting through a pile of clay tablets when he realized he was reading about "a flood, storm, a ship caught on a mountain, and a bird sent out in search of dry land". This is the riveting story of the discovery of the world's first literary epic, the "Epic of Gilgamesh".
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interesting- but not for everyone
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The Templars
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Arguably one of the most provocative, puzzling, and misunderstood organizations of medieval times, the legendary Knights Templar have always been shrouded in a veil of mystery, while inspiring popular culture from Indiana Jones to Dan Brown. In The Templars, author Michael Haag offers a definitive history of these loyal Christian soldiers of the Crusades - sworn to defend the Holy Land and Jerusalem, but ultimately damned and destroyed by the Pope and his church.
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Narrator ruined it
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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
- 1599
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1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.
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Note!--Abridged version
- By Scott on 01-05-16
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The Aleppo Codex
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A true-life thriller about the journey of one of the world's most precious manuscripts - the 10th-century annotated Hebrew Bible known as the Aleppo Codex - from its hiding place in an ancient Syrian synagogue to the newly founded Israel. Using his research, including documents that have been secret for 50 years and interviews with key players, AP correspondent Friedman tells a story of political upheaval, international intrigue, charged courtroom battles, obsession, and subterfuge.
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don't quess at pronunciation of foreign words
- By dlb on 05-28-12
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The Book Smugglers
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The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts - first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets - by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life - to literature and art. And it is entirely true.
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The rescue of Jewish culture in WWII's Lithuania.
- By Logophile on 10-12-20
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Venice
- A New History
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An extraordinary chronicle of Venice, its people, and its grandeur Thomas Madden’s majestic, sprawling history of Venice is the first full portrait of the city in English in almost thirty years. Using long-buried archival material and a wealth of newly translated documents, Madden weaves a spellbinding story of a place and its people, tracing an arc from the city’s humble origins as a lagoon refuge to its apex as a vast maritime empire and Renaissance epicenter to its rebirth as a modern tourist hub.
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Omits slave trade
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Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome
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Acclaimed British historian Anthony Everitt delivers a compelling account of the former orphan who became Roman emperor in A.D. 117 after the death of his guardian Trajan. Hadrian strengthened Rome by ending territorial expansion and fortifying existing borders. And - except for the uprising he triggered in Judea - his strength-based diplomacy brought peace to the realm after a century of warfare.
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A Biography "too tall for the height of the cella"
- By Darwin8u on 08-23-12
By: Anthony Everitt
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What listeners say about Stealing the Mystic Lamb
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jody R. Nathan
- 01-04-12
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
First of all, the narrator sounded like he should be doing tv infomercials for reusable paper towels. Second, the story should be very interesting ( I am a history buff) but strangely it isn't. Perhaps it was the need to constantly refer to the painting at issue during (especially) the beginning of the book; the inability to see what the author was talking about. The first quarter of the book seemed to be a description of the artwork; the second quarter was a general history of the artwork up to the first world war, the third quarter was about the theft of the panels in the 30's and the last part was about its rescue from the Nazis in WWII.
Some of the symbols were discussed, but not the mystic symbolism, other than the obvious. Even the parts which could have been exciting and suspenseful were not written to keep one's interest.
I wanted to like it, and I did learn a bit but was irritated the whole time. Perhaps it was the narrator -- listen first and decide if you can listen to hours of the guy.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Wrightfive
- 10-17-15
terrible audio quality
Is there anything you would change about this book?
the first 7 chapters the reader was going time and a half. all of a sudden starting with Chapter 8 it became a normal audio book. this is one that would definitely be better read.
Any additional comments?
Very interesting history lesson. it didn't live up to the Audible and Goodreads description, but none the less very good history story.
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1 person found this helpful
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- J Shipley
- 04-07-12
great story poor narration
Would you listen to Stealing the Mystic Lamb again? Why?
yes. Because there are many details that go missing in a first time through.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Stealing the Mystic Lamb?
the unique place in history the Lamb occupies
How did the narrator detract from the book?
The narrator has a Jack Webb type staccato style that lacks suitable inflection to appropriately reflect the drama in the story. He also has a very poor command of French, and other non-English, pronunciation. Granted there are lots of nationalities' names in the story.
If you could give Stealing the Mystic Lamb a new subtitle, what would it be?
Entertaining story of the life, so far, of an eternally valuable work
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3 people found this helpful
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- Memi
- 03-25-17
I found this book a hard read
I am acquainted with Noah Charney's podcast and Ted lectures. Found the subject interesting. In addition I wanted to learn more about Jan Van-Eyck and the book has a great biography of his. Beyond that, I found it difficult to follow the thread of information and the book seemed like a shopping list of names, events etc. Eventually I lost interest in the book
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- JKS
- 12-11-24
Narrator did a great disservice to the book.
I found the narrator extremely hard to listen to, especially at the beginning of the book. His speed of reading was awful and his mispronunciation of English and foreign words and names was very irritating. If you don’t know the languages called for, don’t narrate the book!
The text itself was hard to follow at times. I found the topic itself to be very interesting and therefore, I stuck with it.
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