Fraus Pia

Almost all of the personal names, place names, and organization names in this novel are fictional, and the events mentioned are also unrelated to historical fact. In 1979, the existence of a genius painter is revealed to the world by two young Italian art historians. The painter’s name is Francesco Allereri. He painted works in the vein of Waterhouse and Alma-Tadema, vivid with symbolism and delicate expression in a quintessentially 19th-century style. Under the highly strategic direction of the Italian government, citizens grew even more passionate about Allereri, and the craze quickly spread across all of Europe. The two art historians who had discovered Allereri at the time, Gianni Lo Seo and Robertini Orbitchi, were recognized for their contribution to uncovering Allereri and were called “the great Lo Seo” and “the even greater Robertini,” instantly becoming the most attention-grabbing appraisers in the academic world. In particular, Lo Seo, a naturalized Korean, was known as someone with an eye for appraisal that appeared once in a hundred years, producing identification results more accurate than most scientific testing, but unfortunately he died in the 1999 Dafen Great Fire. (* Dafen: an oil-painting street in China, where countless street painters produce dozens of copies a day.) The protagonist, Jeong Seojung, is the son of that Seo Jinho. As a child, he suffered from keratitis and became nearly blind. However, after receiving a corneal transplant from his father, not only did his eyesight recover, but he also inherited his father’s natural gift for connoisseurship, gaining the ability to determine at a glance whether any work is genuine or fake. Because of a series of events related to his father’s death, he becomes disillusioned with the art world and wants to live a life far from paintings, but he is persuaded by Robertini, his father’s close friend and his own godfather, and, while hiding his identity, works as a consulting agent for Interpol, judging whether stolen goods are authentic. Then one day Ian Lau appears before him. A media conglomerate heir from the Hong Kong mafia and the son of a noble British aristocrat, Ian Lau is a man whose wildly mismatched titles make him even more impossible to pin down. He openly shows his interest in Jeong, and Jeong, even while knowing it is best not to get involved recklessly, cannot help but be drawn to him. Meanwhile, it is revealed that the painting by Allereri that Jeong’s sworn brother and Robertini’s son Benedito sold to Jin Xiaofeng is a fake, and Ian Lau intends to deal with Benedito according to his father-in-law’s wishes. Jeong, learning the truth only afterward, becomes suspicious that Benedito failed to recognize a painting by none other than Allereri, and asks Ian to show him the painting in question. When Jeong receives the painting from Ian, he is stunned. It was a forgery rendered so perfectly that it was impossible to judge its authenticity. As far as Jeong knew, there was only one person who could copy Allereri’s paintings this precisely: Yu Yan, his friend and the man suspected of being the mastermind behind the Dafen Great Fire from more than a decade ago. In the end, Jeong decides to provide free appraisals for all of the Allereri works purchased by Jin Xiaofeng in exchange for sparing Benedito, and heads to China with Ian....

Machine-translated · Show original