Little
does
Adrian know that by walking into an art gallery he would be caught up
in a
story initiated long ago by a Dutch painter. A haunting face reflected
in the
mirror of a vanitas drawn three centuries earlier
gazes back at him from
a modern-day painting, stirring in him hopes of bringing back his own
dead
wife. For doesn’t the woman in the mirror seem to have sailed across
the ages,
unscathed by time and coveted by generations of artists? With the help
of a mad
historian and an embalmer savant, he attempts to discover the secret
behind the
paintings, delving into the realm of pigments and powders, where the
shadows of
ancient alchemists still loom.
On the brink of solving the enigma, he
suddenly realises that nothing in this adventure is due to chance, and
that the
stakes of the whole matter go well beyond the artistic rendering of
youth and
beauty.