Pieter Van de Graeff is stuck in Vienna in August heat. While waiting for a real-estate deal to close, the last thing this art dealer expects to find is a treasure in a grubby shop about to shut doors forever. He has no idea that his life as an affluent bachelor will change overnight with his discovery of a memoir by Bartholomaeus Spranger (1546-1611), a gifted Flemish-born artist known for his erotic paintings.
Karolina Světlá, a goofy graduate student of history, enters his life with sweaty clothes on her back and a piece of chewing gum stuck to her hand. As she translates the manuscript, their lives gradually blend with Spranger’s. Meeting in New York for the first major exhibition of his art, Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague (Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 2014―January 2015), Pieter and Karo struggle to understand each other while under the influence of something much more powerful than a bottle of great champagne. Spranger’s erotic memories from his life at the imperial court of Rudolf II Habsburg color their own relationship four hundred years later.
Besides notable snippets of cultural and social history, not surprisingly, the plot explores human passions, in which lust, man’s oldest obsession, often reigns over affairs of heart and reason.