Noah Charney is an internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books and a professor of art history specializing in art crime. His novel, The Art Thief, was a bestseller in five countries and is translated into 17 languages. His The Art of Forgery, Stealing the Mystic Lamb and Slovenology were international bestsellers, and The Art of Forgery and Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art were Amazon #1 bestsellers in art history. Collector of Lives was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and Eternal Architect: The Life and Art of Joze Plecnik, Modernist Mystic was runner-up for the Book of the Year Award in Slovenia, where Charney has lived for many years, and won Best Book at the Architecture Biennial in Novi Sad, Serbia.

He appears occasionally as a television presenter, with shows for BBC, National Geographic, among many others, and is in demand as a speaker, having been a finalist to be a TED Fellow and with recent talks at the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is currently writing a television series for HBO Europe, and writes regularly for the Guardian, the Washington Post, Salon, the Observer, and many other top magazines and newspapers.

Trained in art history at The Courtauld Institute, Cambridge University, and University of Ljubljana, Charney has taught for many years, for Yale and Brown University, and in Cambridge, Florence, Rome, and Ljubljana. Charney is now a professor of art history at the American University of Rome and at University of Ljubljana.

Table of Contents

Sympathy for the Devil

Chapter 1: Scandal

Chapter 2: Shock

Chapter 3: Rivalry

When the Best Artists are "Bad"

About the Author