Writing, for me, is more than just telling great stories; it is a way of probing for the things that truly matter to us as human beings. My characters, like all of us, are striving to discover some kind of truth, to answer a fundamental question about themselves as they confront life's dilemmas. Having been involved in the art world most of my life as a historian, connoisseur, and collector, I find that the visual arts inform my writing, both in terms of description and physical setting—always a character in its own right—and the struggle artists endure to explore the world from every angle. Great art, like great literature, must never give up all its secrets; there must always be enough mystery and ambiguity to keep the thing fresh and alive. Most profound art is about conveying feeling and the sense of spiritual quest—the fluttering glimpse of the unseen at life’s ecstatic heart. We exist under the spell of memory, infused with the metamorphic glories of the visual world.
In Gods of Deception, acclaimed novelist David Adams Cleveland has created a thrilling tale of espionage, a family saga, a stirring love story, and a meditation on time and memory, taking you on an unforgettable journey into the troubled human heart as well as the past-a past that is ever present, where the gods of deception await our distant call.
Common sense dictates that it simply cannot exist -- the "Leopardi Madonna," a glorious treasure by the fifteenth-century master Santi Raphael. All the reference books and reliable scholarship indicate that the painting was destroyed in 1945, when the Allies bombed a Nazi warehouse filled with looted art. Only now the Madonna has reappeared, it seems, in this stunning, original thriller that uncovers greed and treachery in the rarefied precincts of the art world. Summoned to Venice from America to view the painting, Renaissance scholar and sometime-art dealer Jordan Brooks returns to the city that had enchanted him twenty years before. As he ponders the possibility that a fake was set afire a half century earlier and the authentic work has resurfaced -- or that the actual masterpiece was lost in the conflagration and a magnificent fake has taken its place -- he also contemplates the strange and secret auction which offers him a chance to bid on the painting. Set against the backdrop of Venice in late autumn, when the timeless city's rain-swollen lagoons threaten to swamp all her treasures, the novel limns the path that lands Jordan on the doorstep of his former teacher, Giorgio Sagredo, who has compromised his ideals to sell the Madonna. It leads Jordan, too, into a horde of amoral art dealers eager to make a killing and, more fortuitously, introduces him to Katie, a young American student who has a scent for the truth and a way of turning up at the moment he needs her most.
As Robert goes about his daily activities during April, he encounters an ever-increasing number of rabbits.