The story was well-written and flowed well, the characters were realistic and interesting.
I believe it would have been very difficult to be a woman at this time, let alone a woman who wanted to be more than just a wife and a mother. I had been unaware that Florence had its own version of the Spanish Inquisition, but then I suppose most places suffered from such excesses during this age. It was interesting to see how the death of Lorenzo de Medici affected the entire future of the city-state he ruled and how easily it slipped from enlightened to fanatic. I enjoyed the details about the city, the history and the culture of 1490s Florence. Coming from an upper-class family and schooled beyond the normal level for girls of her time, Alessandra has a love of art and an understanding of classics that drive her to live an unusual life, and give her a platform from which to bear witness to both the wonders of, and dissolution of, the great city of Florence.
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city.With Savonarola, the Bonfires of the Vanities, and the religious fervor that swept Florence in the 1490s as its historical reference, Dunant has chosen to tell the story of Alessandra Cecchi, a strong-willed girl who influences a young painter. 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.
A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities.īut their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. 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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