In 15th century Florence, five women and a legendary artist weave together a dangerous plot that could bring peace - or get them all killed. Seeking to wrest power from the Medici, members of the Pazzi family slay the beloved Giuliano. But Lorenzo de' Medici survives the attack and seeks revenge on everyone involved, plunging the city into murderous chaos. Bodies are dragged through the streets, and no one is safe. Five women steal away to a church to ply their craft in secret. Viviana, Fiammetta, Isabetta, Natasia and Mattea are painters, not allowed to be public with their skill but freed from the restrictions in their lives by their art. When a sixth member of their group, Lapaccia, goes missing and is rumored to have stolen a much sought-after painting before she vanished, the women must venture out into the dangerous streets to find their friend. They will have help from one of the most renowned painters of their era: the peaceful and kind Leonardo da Vinci. It is under his tutelage that they flourish as artists and with his access that they infiltrate some of the highest, most secretive places in Florence, unraveling one conspiracy as they build another in its place. Vibrant and absorbing, Portrait Of A Conspiracy is the first novel in Donna Russo Morin's Da Vinci's Disciples series.

In *The Van Gogh Conspiracy,* the discovery of a "new" painting by Van Gogh hidden in the barn of a rural French farmhouse sets the art world spinning. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam authenticates the painting, and the poor French family in whose barn it was discovered stands to collect millions once the painting is auctioned. But a holocaust survivor living in New York claims the painting is actually his, and was stolen from him by the Nazis. He hires a team to help him prove that the "bill of sale" he has in Van Gogh’s handwriting is authentic. The international investigation leads to the discovery of another never-seen-before Van Gogh, and the revelation that someone working in the Van Gogh Museum has access to an entire horde of famous painting stolen by the Nazis during World War II—and has been secretly sending them to former Nazis around the world so that they can sell them at auction and make millions.

"Art and Camille team up once again to solve a large museum theft, using one of the biggest heists in history to help them solve the case"--

In The Conspiracy of Modern Art the Brazilian critic and art-historian Luiz Renato Martins presents a new account of modern art from David to Abstract Expressionism. The once vibrant debate on these touchstones of modernism has gone stale. Viewed from the Sao Paulo megalopolis the art of Paris and New York - embodying Revolution, Thermidor, Bonapartistm and Bourgeois ‘Triumph' - once more pulsates in tragic key. Equally attentive to form and politics, Martins invites us to look again at familiar pictures. In the process, modern art appears in a new light. These essays, largely unknown to an English-speaking audience, may be the most important contribution to the account of modern painting since the important debates of the 1980s.

Features the text of a January 22, 1807 message written by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) concerning the Burr Conspiracy, provided online as part of the Avalon Project of the Yale University Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. Discusses an alleged conspiracy by American political leader Aaron Burr (1756-1836) to create a new country in the southwestern United States.