So I started reading this book with just a vague notion that I'd read a review a while back about this being a work of fantasy / magical realism, and there was an undercurrent of something magical which made it possible to keep thinking that it's going to veer of from our mundane reality at any point. I think there was something interesting about reading with that perspective, because the journey of this painting over the ages. As the author puts it:

«For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.»