The Irish Game: a True Story of Crime and Art

The Irish Game: A genuine Story of Crime and Art Matthew Hart

Chatto and Windus, 15 [pound sterling] ISBN 070117755 1

The Amber play Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian muster Atlantic Books, 17.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1843540355

The Voynich Manuscript Gerry Kennedy and rook Churchill Orion, 18.99 [pounds sterling] ISBN 075285996

A quick search for holiday reading upon the art shelves of any bookshop reveals that three subdues dominate the choices: theft, forgery and destruction. As in newspaper journalism, with equal reason in popular book publishing: art alone makes headline news when it is not to be found or stolen, or costs one a great deal of circulating medium The three books I have pick outed are no exception, but each takes a sympathetic and flat sensitive approach to the works of art that form the peg for these pacily written and intriguing tales.

Matthew Hart's The Irish Game uses the story of the thefts of Sir Alfred Belt's elderly Master paintings from Russborough House, Co Wicklow, as a starting point for a discussion of the question on what account major Old Masters are stolen, when they cannot possibly be resold to a legitimate buyer and public collections will usually not pay ransoms. The first theft, in 1974 arranged by dint of Bridget Dugdale, a naive English supporter of the IRA, was black farce. Dugdale was quickly arrested, and the pictures win backed but she and her henchmen treated the Belts and their servants with amateurish brutality. The next to the first theft, by the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, in 1986 was by means of comparison a swift, professional job

Hart outstrips in his depiction of Irish criminal and political life in the late 1980 which elucidates the connection of what was an act of hubris through Cahill, depicted here as a paranoid four-footed animal rather than the romantic Mack-the-Knife figure of Liffey myth Hart explains how the paintings--pre-eminently Vermeeer's Lady writing a alphabetic character with her maid--were probably intended to be cashed in with other criminals wanting collateral for remedy or armament deals.

Cahill was brought down by the agency of a combination of elements. Firstly, there was the zeal of the gardai, who were determined not to permit him make fools of them. They were helped through the revelation after the robbery that the paintings had been at handed by the Belts to the National Gallery of Ireland. It was therefore a theft from the Irish race rather than from a rich landowner. Secondly Cahill tendered the paintings to the UVF of recent origins that he was dealing with Protestant terrorists caused him a major los of face in Dublin's underworld.

His answer was simply to hide the pictures. Hart intriguingly give an inkling ofs that it was almost certainly the publicity surrounding the theft of (still unrecovered) paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990--including a Vermeer--that made Cahill realise in what manner extremely valuable the Belt paintings were, and in like manner initiate the disposal that preced his murder

Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian raise tell the story of the Amber field in the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg made for Catherine the Great, which disappeared during the Nazi occupation of the city and has not ever been seen since. This is an exhaustively detailed account of the authors' industrious search from one side German and Russian archives for the solution to the mystery.

Their conclusion--that the latitude was destroyed--did not strike me as especially sad, simply because, unlike a Vermeer of that kind a work can be rebuilded and it now has been, using the amazing skills finisheded by the Russians in the reconstruction of their palaces after the war. The best aspect of the volume is its vivid picture of the Nazi obsession with looting art and the thoroughness with which the Russians sought its repatriation.

A taste for cryptography will help happiness of Gerry Kennedy and plunder Churchill's The Voynich Manuscript. Its subtitle--'the unsolv riddle of an extraordinary volume which has defied interpretation for centuries'--rather anti-climactically reveals the authors' conclusion. They indeed do not clear the mystery of the Beinecke Library's celebrated manuscript, named after the Lithuanian-born bookdealer Wilfrid Voynich, who claimed to have place it in a monastic collection in Italy in 1912 Written in a digest or a secret language (or perhaps simply gibberish), it is a manuscript of uncertain date, possibly sixteenth hundred illustrated with drawings of naked women unidentifiable plants and mysterious symbols

Nobody has deciphered it, on the other hand in telling the story of the various attempts, a certain quantity of of considerable lunacy, the authors have a great deal of merriment not least with Voynich, a Conradian figure who lied about the manuscript's provenance, claiming it had been written through the thirteenth-century scientist Roger Bacon and had belonged to the Elizabathan magus John Dee He may also have embellished it, if he did not actually forge it, as has been suspected.

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