Relate enigmas and episodes of art

There's something about the act of contemplating a painting that is universal and disarming. Simply laying our gaze on a work activates an emotional circuit that reshapes our way of perceiving the world. Perhaps that's why we continue to write about art. Despite the thousands of books that have been published, the subject seems inexhaustible, as if, deep down, we know absolutely nothing.

The big question—what is art?—remains open. Seeking an answer would be excessive. Doing so would imply attributing utility to something that, by nature, has none. As Nuccio Ordine said, the value of art lies precisely in its uselessness. What we do know is that it moves us. From top to bottom and in all directions. And that it offers much.

Perhaps that's why we narrate it: to fill the mystery it leaves open with stories. To insist on understanding it, to search for the words. Fertile ground for fiction. Just as art doesn't respond to a specific function, neither do the books that address it. Its breadth is also its elasticity, allowing for all kinds of approaches.

Thus, in times marked by the practical and the immediate, books that approach art offer us something different: a way of being in the world that doesn't seek to solve everything, but rather to open more questions. It's inspiring to read books that dare to explore this field full of abstractions. Perhaps, in doing so, we'll discover a subtle thread that runs through them.

Worldview inside a painting

We begin with a question: what if the mystery of art were deliberate? Journalist Javier Sierra (Teruel, 1971) takes that intuition as the narrative driving force of his novel The Master Plan ( Planeta ). It all began when a man approached him at the Prado Museum to confess that some paintings are portals to other worlds, and that there is a society charged with protecting them.

⁄Carlos del Amor traces the story of a supposedly forgotten Velázquez, perhaps a portrait of Juana Pacheco, his wife

Since then, the author has devoted himself to the search. Halfway between mythology and historical documentation, Javier Sierra flies through a world where paintings expand their reach and reach out to us. Paintings that preserve hidden knowledge, perceptible only to those who know how to look. The way we observe transforms everything; doesn't that say quantum physics?

In a world saturated with stimuli, the Aragonese author proposes sharpening our senses to detect those symbols that guide us toward a broader reality. In this everyday life of practical knowledge and numbers, the novel reminds us that art is a gateway to other dimensions of knowledge, and that it is as ancient as it is necessary.

The compulsion to possess beauty

From this spiritual dimension, we move on to a more human one. In The Art Thief ( Taurus ), journalist Michael Finkel (Atlanta, 1969) reconstructs the story of Stéphane Breitweiser, a young Frenchman who stole more than 300 works from European museums. He piled them up in the attic of his house to contemplate them in solitude. He visited museums and cathedrals in broad daylight, and if a piece stole his heart, he had to possess it. He would take out his Swiss Army knife, detach the work from its structure, and leave the premises as calmly as any other visitor. Together with his partner and accomplice, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, he traveled around Europe, evading security systems. They did so without violence. They paid their entrance fee and, in return, took home a souvenir—illegal but carefully chosen.

When the inevitable fall came, psychologists and judges tried to decipher the Breitweiser case. Is he a kleptomaniac? A psychopath? A hopeless romantic? A real treat for personality disorder specialists.

For Breitweiser, museums are prisons for art. This leitmotif could have made him the Robin Hood of art if he had shared his loot, but the truth is, he kept the works in his home, inaccessible to everyone except himself. A gesture of absolute love or radical selfishness, or perhaps both at the same time.

⁄ Michael Finkel reconstructs the story of a young Frenchman who stole three hundred works from European museums

Grave robbers

From individual to structural appropriation, we now move on to the most mischievous in the history of looting. Arqueomàfia ( The Bell ), by criminologist Marc Balcells (Barcelona, 1979), takes us into the world of the tombaroli : tomb robbers who have operated for centuries on the fringes of everything. These robbers are deeply rooted in European culture, especially in a country like Italy. Many come from families where tomb robbery is a tradition, and some see themselves as amateur archaeologists.

For years, collecting archaeological artifacts was a fad. Illegally extracted objects decorated private homes. The pieces were whitewashed with fabricated stories, and their provenance was rarely questioned. Their value was aesthetic, not historical. According to Balcells, when the scientific dimension of these objects is lost and they are reduced to a decorative function, their capacity to transmit knowledge is also lost. By extracting these artifacts without studying their context, the story of the past is forever interrupted. Arqueomàfia proposes a scientific approach beyond the stigma. If we want to protect historical heritage, it's not enough to criminalize: we must understand who threatens it, why they do it, and how they have managed to keep their activity alive for so long.

Decolonizing museums

But what happens when an institution that preserves history also manipulates it to its liking? Alice Procter (Sydney, 1995), art historian and guide of the subversive Uncomfortable Art Tours, begins with this contradiction to dismantle the official narrative of British museums. In The Complete Picture ( Captain Swing ), she poses a delicate question: how much violence is behind the museums we venerate?

Her aim is not to destroy museums, but to question their authority. With devastating clarity, she reminds us that many of the works on display are the fruit of colonial plunder. She guides us through objects that were stripped of their original value and relocated under an imperial logic, revealing their true history. The Australian artist makes it clear: museums are not neutral spaces, but rather institutions that perpetuate racial and economic hierarchies. De facto exclusionary places where non-Western voices were silenced and remain so.

Their proposal is forceful: return these pieces to their original communities. Not as a symbolic gesture, but as an act of material justice. Decolonization implies acknowledging the violence of the past, assuming historical guilt, and paving the way for more just narratives.

Criminologist Marc Balcells takes us into the world of the 'tombaroli': grave robbers who have been operating for centuries.

Humanize Da Vinci

Faced with these power structures, the philologist and historian Carlos Vecce (Naples, 1959) proposes a more intimate approach. Life of Leonardo ( Alfaguara ) descends from myth to land in the man: who was Leonardo da Vinci really before he became a legend? Through numerous archives, Vecce followed Leonardo's family trail until he found his mother, Caterina, a Circassian slave of a couple of Florentine merchants.

Through manuscripts, inventories, and Leonardo's own notes, Vecce takes us back to his first steps in Vinci. He also walks alongside a young, restless Leonardo, who resisted the norms of his time. Beyond the genius, there is an unfinished man, capable of losing himself in the anatomy of a leaf or the movement of a wing. This perspective cannot be explained without understanding his weaknesses: the need for affection, the fear of mediocrity, the frustration with a society that already prized the useful over the beautiful. Thanks to Vecce, we know that Leonardo's weaknesses are also ours, and that geniuses exist in every era, including our own.

There is a woman behind the painting

Carlos del Amor (Murcia, 1974) knows the fragility of stories. In his book Una dama desconocida (An Unknown Lady) ( Espasa ), the well-known television journalist delves into a different kind of mystery. This time, it doesn't emerge from underground or from inside a canvas, but from an email: a message suggesting that a forgotten painting could be by Velázquez. Del Amor prepares to take a run at it and launch himself into the search for answers: what if the woman in the portrait is Juana Pacheco, the painter's wife? Following the trail of this silent figure, we follow the investigation in first-person detail.

In this quest, the journalist reclaims what has been left out of official narratives, like so many women portrayed by great masters, about whom we know nothing. Intuition as a critical compass that guides us toward suspicion. And the possibility of always expanding the boundaries of what we already know.

Art as a refuge

Beyond the critical perspective and its questions, art is also a source of solace. This has been the case for Laura Cumming (Edinburgh, 1961), as she explains in her book, Trueno ( Crítica ), a journey through the art of the Dutch Golden Age and a personal memoir about the power of images. It all began with a small painting by Carel Fabritius hanging in London's National Gallery. A pensive man, musical instruments, and a city in the background. For Cumming, a recent arrival in the city, that painting was a refuge.

⁄ Laura Cumming links the story of the Dutchman Carel Fabritius with that of her father, also a painter

The author intertwines Fabritius's story with that of her father, also a painter. All of this is interwoven with a central question: what can art tell us about life, death, and ourselves? Laura Cumming is interested in the tremor that art produces. She believes that all paintings contain something essential about life. Images are mirrors that reflect something we carry within. If we feel a jolt, a shudder, when we look at a painting, it is because we are understanding something that can only be formulated from silence.

A garden is also a museum

As if art could also be planted and grown on fertile soil, Vicente Todolí (Palmera, 1958) reminds us that art doesn't always hang on a wall. In I Wish to Create a Garden (and Watch It Grow) ( Espasa ), the contemporary art curator becomes a farmer, and in this gesture, he finds another way to explore beauty.

Todolí, who was director of the Tate Modern, returns to the Valencian town of Palmera to continue his father's work: growing citrus fruits. In his garden, which already houses more than 500 varieties, we find echoes of the Medici family, who also collected fruit as works of art. For Todolí, tending a garden is like curating a collection, although in this case, the pieces are alive, growing and dying, changing on their own, at will.

The book interweaves his memories abroad with fascinating reflections on the art industry, architecture, uncontrolled urban planning in Valencia, and the dictatorship of the spectacle. At the same time, it traces an inspiring journey through the decisions he has made throughout his life.

Untouched by the immediacy of the digital world, Todolí champions physical contact, long conversations, and the information offered by a gesture or a glance. In a time when visibility seems paramount and an increasingly ferocious pace prevails, he champions protecting the earth and cultivating it; contemplating growth, patient waiting. The book invites us to consider other forms of creation, necessary for a sustainable and livable future. In other books, art is questioned, lost, or tracked down, but here it is planted on fertile soil. As if art, too, needed to re-root itself to flourish anew.

⁄ Todolí, who was director of the Tate Modern, returns to the Valencian town of Palmera to look after a garden

A crack towards mystery

What art gives back to us cannot be measured. Nor can it be captured in words. But in that interaction, there is certainly a path back. These books propose different ways of approaching the same thing: an experience that escapes language, yet insists on staying, and that each glance translates differently. Perhaps all the authors share the same intuition: that art cannot be explained, but can be experienced. A crack that opens in the physical and allows us to peer into the mystery. A way of being in the world without fully understanding it.

Interview with Javier Sierra “I start from one myth to create another, using art as a vehicle.”

Javier Sierra is one of the few Spanish writers who has managed to make it onto The New York Times bestseller list, and not by chance. A journalist by training and a novelist by vocation, he is the author of international bestsellers such as The Prado Master and Invisible Fire , for which he won the Planeta Prize in 2017. His books dance between documentary rigor and esoteric fiction. We spoke with him about master gods, forgotten symbols, and art as a bridge between different planes of existence. He suggests that some works of art hide knowledge passed down by primordial masters. What truth lies behind this fiction? It is a mythological truth. In founding stories of cultures such as Mesopotamia, the peoples of the Andean plateau, the Dogon of Mali in Africa, ancient Egypt, and the Indian Vedas, there is talk of "master gods" who brought civilization. They are usually described as creatures emerging from the water, half-human, half-animal, who taught us how to build our homes, domesticate animals, create laws, or select seeds for food. What strikes me most about these stories is their universality, as if all latitudes of the planet needed to attribute the foundations of culture to a collective of masters. What kind of reading should we make of the works to grasp this hidden message? I invite us to trace these master instructors from cave art to historical art. Bosch, for example, introduced half-human, half-fish figures into his works, reminiscent of one of the most famous teaching gods of antiquity: the Babylonian Oannes. The mysterious thing is that in his time, the Babylonian tablets that mentioned him had not yet been found. I take advantage of this historical gap to imagine a secret society of wise men who protect humanity. In other words, I start from one myth to create another, using art as a vehicle. The master plan oscillates between the historical and the esoteric. How does it navigate that boundary? I spend a lot of time researching. When the known ends, I turn to fiction. I'm not interested in recounting what is already known, but rather in exploring the unknown and proposing a new scenario. How can fiction enrich or challenge knowledge? I had a wonderful experience in that regard years ago, when I published The Secret Supper. In that novel, I reconstructed the creation process of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper and explored his conflicts with the Church. By studying his work, I thought I'd found a key to interpreting his cenacle in a radically new way. My work ended up in the hands of Pinin Brambilla, the doctor who spent twenty years restoring The Last Supper. One day, she called me to tell me that I had made her read that painting in a completely new way. Using fiction, I pushed her to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the material she worked on for so long. It was very moving. It proposes that art acts as a technology of spiritual transmission. Do you think today's society has lost the ability to interpret symbols? I like that concept of a technology of spiritual transmission. Indeed: art is a channel of communication. In prehistoric times, our ancestors felt the walls of caves before painting them. They did so because they sensed they were a membrane separating their world from that of the spirits. So, when they stumbled upon a lump in the wall, they thought it was the belly of a bison and colored it in. Art was born to mark spirits, as a practical tool. Over time, we learned to manipulate its hypnotic fascination for more mundane, propaganda purposes, and we ended up forgetting its original purpose. In your book, art has an initiatory function. What responsibility do museums and educators have today? Art needs a narrative. Historical data isn't enough. Museums must preserve it and bring it closer to new generations, but we writers have the mission to give it substance. From Umberto Eco to Dan Brown, from Ken Follett to Arturo Pérez Reverte, we have all contributed to readers of all ages resonating with art. The power of words can take you much further than any scrolling of images. If I had to choose one word to define that master plan, what would it be? Epiphany. Beyond its religious meaning, it's that feeling of wonder we experience when we fully understand something. It's the term the first astronauts used when they saw that the Earth was round, becoming aware of their place in the universe. Art, when understood, has that effect. With The Master Plan, I want to unleash it in the minds of my readers.