The Birth of Venus is a tour de force." Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire "Dunant has created a vivid and compellingly believable picture of Renaissance Florence: the squalor and brutality the confidence and vitality the political machinations. She writes like a painter, and thinks like a philosopher: juxtapositioning the humane against the animal, hope against fanaticism, creativity against destruction. Dunant's snaky tale of art, sex and Florentine hysteria consumes utterlybut the experience is all pleasure." Simon Schama "Sarah Dunant has given us a story of sacrifice and betrayal, set during Florence's captivity under the fanatic Savonarola. "Simply amazing, so brilliantly written.almost intolerably exciting at times, and at others, equally poignant." Antonia Fraser "A beautiful serpent of a novel, seductive and dangerous.full of wise guile, the most brilliant novel yet from a writer of powerful historical imagination and wicked literary gifts.
It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain's most innovative writers of literary suspense.
Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra's married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola's reactionary followers. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control.
But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra's parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man.
A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities. Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family's Florentine palazzo.
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