John D Lyons
Young art historian Gregory Byrne takes a teaching job at Thornton College in Vermont. It is 1972, and this bastion of traditional all-male education has finally accepted its first class of women. Greg settles into the office of his predecessor, Volker Baum, and sets about selecting textbooks for his course. Then he learns that Baum had been found dead in a pool of blood in his room at the American Academy in Rome. Soon, the idyllic campus seems full of secrets. Could there be a key to these in the work of the Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin, whom Baum and Greg both study? Chief among his paintings was the enigmatic 'Shepherds of Arcadia,' which depicts three young men trying to decipher a fragmentary Latin inscription. As Greg works against the clock to finish a book on coded meanings in Baroque painting and thus to get tenure, the newspapers report that the British intelligence agency MI 5 finally revealed that the world’s leading expert on Poussin was a spy, a double agent, working on behalf of the Soviets. Did all this fit together? Or was Gregory losing his grip on reality?
