By Vernon Silver
A pulse-pounding real-life chase for an historic masterpiece of immeasurable worth . . .
Sotheby's. long island urban. June 19, 1990.
not anything of its style were bought to the general public in additional than a century. On a hot June night on Manhattan's top East facet, with the auction-house showroom full of the rich, the curious, and the click, background was once made while an nameless guy in a eco-friendly golfing sweater paid an unparalleled 3 quarters of 1000000 money to win the twenty-five-hundred-year-old chalice. After that evening, this ancient artifact disappeared, its whereabouts a secret. Until now.
it truly is one of the so much prized of antiquities: the Greek artist Euphronios's wine cup depicting the dying of Zeus's son Sarpedon at Troy. misplaced for greater than millennia, the chalice—one of basically six of its type stumbled on intact—mysteriously surfaced within the number of a Hollywood manufacturer, who then bought it to a Texas billionaire. Coveted by way of obsessed inner most creditors, purchasers, and museum curators, it used to be additionally of extreme curiosity to the Italian police, who believed it belonged to their nation, the place it had first been dug up prior within the 20th century.
during this breathtaking story of historical past, event, and intrigue, archaeologist and journalist Vernon Silver items jointly the intense story of the misplaced cup and provides a portrait of the fashionable antiquities exchange: a global of tomb raiders, smugglers, prosperous creditors, formidable archaeol-ogists, rapacious buyers, corrupt curators, and overseas legislations enforcement. Spanning twenty-five hundred years, The misplaced Chalice strikes from the mythic battlefield of the Trojan battle to the geographical region of twentieth-century Tuscany, the dusty libraries of Oxford collage to the exhibition halls of recent York's Metropolitan Museum of paintings, the cramped law-enforcement places of work of the Carabinieri to the tony rooms of latest York's public sale homes to unravel the secret of the world's rarest masterpiece.
As Silver learns, the invention of the chalice exposes one other riddle—and a good larger lacking treasure. Epic and exciting, The misplaced Chalice is a riding true-life detective tale that illuminates a big-money, high-stakes, double-dealing global, that's as interesting because it is unforgettable. Silver's exciting story opens a window onto Italian background, tradition, and lifestyles hardly ever noticeable.
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Additional info for The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece
Example text
Molin struck again, as close to the same place as he could—witchcraft had restored his vigor, but it couldn’t replace the practice he’d missed over the last many years. The stranger cried out in pain. He curved over his leg like a reed in the wind, but backed away from a killing blow. “Prayer will not save you, Torchholder. You tore her children from her breast. You fed them poison and let them die. You wasted their blood! Wasted blood! She has thirsted all this time for yours—” The Dyareelan had proved that he knew whom he was attacking.
The clatter of the closing gate drowned out anything else Vurben might have said. “Did you hear that? The brazen cur,” Atredan complained. “You’re not thinking of running this Burggit to ground, are you? ” “For what? I did countermand his orders. ” “That man presumed to give you an order! He gave orders to an Imperial lord. He spoke to you as though you were another Wrigglie pud. He should be made an example of. Forget this Buggit; go to Captain Eraldus—he knows who puts food on his damn plate.
Let’s take the other way, Lord Torchholder,” Atredan pled, no longer hiding his fear. When he’d been a young man—or even a middle-aged one—Molin would have pursued the straggler into Ils’s temple. He had no quarrel with some Ils-worshiper who preferred chiseled stone to the pile of bricks outside the wall, but once the Hand had driven Ils’s priests out of His temple, they’d chosen His marble hall as the site for an altar to their bloodthirsty goddess. Molin had worked beside a score of priests representing almost as many gods to destroy that altar, that abomination.