The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

by Michael Finkel

They’d reached the Loire valley, playground of French nobility for centuries and a fairy tale still, a procession of vineyards and castles lining the meandering river.

I'm reading The Nightingale in parallel and it's also set in the Loire valley.

Art may in fact have a Darwinian basis, perhaps as a way to attract a mate, though many art theorists now believe that the reason for art’s ubiquity is that humanity has overcome natural selection.

Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.

unhealthy collecting, as opposed to a clutter of snow globes on your bedroom shelf, takes over one’s life, arising most commonly in people prone to depression who feel out of place in society.

His favorite art-heist movie, he later says, is The Thomas Crown Affair, with Pierce Brosnan.

His aesthetic ideals about idolizing beauty, treating each piece as an honored guest, have descended into hoarding.

In the taxonomy of sin, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine belong with the book thieves.

Bibliomaniacs