Vernon Silver

The Lost Chalice

Sotheby’s. New York City. June 19, 1990.

Nothing of its kind had been sold to the public in more than a century. On this rainy June evening on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, history was made when an anonymous European bidder won the 2,500-year-old chalice. After that night, the cup painted by the Leonardo da Vinci of ancient Greece disappeared, its whereabouts a mystery. Until now.

The Mystery

Its bigger twin, the legendary Euphronios Krater, was already the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s showpiece. Yet the chalice followed a more shadowy path, surfacing after more than two millennia only to disappear again.

Buy The Lost Chalice

The Lost Chalice moves from the mythic battlefield of the Trojan War to the countryside of twentieth-century Rome, the libraries of Oxford and the exhibition halls of New York. The tale of a single cup’s ancient origins and its modern odyssey exposes a network of crime, commerce and art, as an incredible cast of tomb robbers, smugglers, collectors and cops determines the fate of a masterpiece.