As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter, Han van Meegeren, who dared to impersonate Vermeer centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

Haarlem, Holland, seventeenth-century: The city’s chief magistrate commissions a family portrait from Dutch master painter Johannes Miereveld. But when the artist sees the magistrate’s daughter, Amalia, an illicit love affair begins. Miereveld creates a captivating masterpiece, The Chrysalis–a stunning portrait of the Virgin Mary, full of Catholic symbols, that outrages his Protestant patron and signals the death of his career.
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Called to Nazi-occupied Italy in 1943, a German photographer and an American stenographer hunt for priceless masterpieces before they are destroyed by Hitler, in this pulse-pounding adventure inspired by the incredible true story of the Monuments Women, the Fifth Army WACs and the looted Florentine art collections during World War II. Summer, 1943. Eva Brunner is taking photographs of Nazi-looted art hidden in the salt mines of the Austrian hinterland....

Bruno Lohse (1911-2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Göring to Hitler's art looting agency in Paris, he went on to help supervise the systematic theft and distribution of more than thirty thousand artworks, taken largely from French Jews, and to assist Göring in amassing an enormous private art collection. By the 1950s Lohse was officially denazified but was back in the art dealing world, offering...

"In 2009, eighty-five-year-old art professor Ludka Zeilonka gets drawn into a political firestorm when her grandson Tommy is among a group of gay Massachusetts teachers fired for allegedly silencing Christian kids in high school classrooms. The ensuing battle to reinstate the teachers raises the specter of Ludka's World War II past--a past she's spent a lifetime trying to forget ... As Ludka's influential family defends Tommy under increasingly vicious...

"The previously untold story of a little-known WWII Allied division whose mission was to track down European art and treasures that had been looted by the Nazis at Hitler's command" -- "The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised. In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art...

An unlikely World War II platoon has been tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners. With the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could they possibly succeed? But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time, they would risk their lives to protect...

"The gripping true story of the bold and determined museum curators who saved the priceless treasures of China's Forbidden City in the years leading up to World War II and beyond"-- Spring, 1933. Peking's Forbidden City is tense with fear and expectation. Japan's aircraft drone overhead, its troops and tanks are only hours away. How will the curators protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge? A million pieces of art-- objects that...

"Imagine a Museum of Lost Art. It would contain more masterpieces than all the world's existing museums combined. From ancient sculptures of Athens and Rome to icons and paintings erased by the Reformation, from artworks destroyed by the Nazis to those looted and smashed by ISIS, a Museum of Lost Art would provide a cutting reminder of the fragility of the world's treasures. [This book] examines the adventures and misadventures of art lost, but also...

"The world was stunned when eighty-year old Cornelius Gurlitt became an international media superstar in November 2013 on the discovery of over 1,400 artworks in his 1,076 square-foot Munich apartment, valued at around $1.35 billion. Gurlitt became known as a man who never was - he didn't have a bank account, never paid tax, never received social security. He simply did not exist. He had been hard-wired into a life of shadows and secrecy by his own...