The Art Lover

Traveling through Trieste in June, 1768, the renowned antiquarian and scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann was brutally murdered in his hotel room by an itinerant cook named Francesco Arcangeli. "The Art Lover" unravels the mysterious circumstances of Winckelmann's death, dramatizing the very different kinds of desperation that drew two very different men to the place of their fateful meeting.

Ingeniously weaving together Winckelmann's writings and letters and the exhaustive documents from Arcangeli's trial, Udayan Sen creates a complex and compelling portrait of two men driven by their lowly origins to seek freedom - the promise of the Enlightenment - but in tragically different ways.