I had a very specific reason for reading this book: it is a historical novel set in Florence and I was about to visit there. Having finished the book, I can safely say that visiting the city in which it is set is not a requirement. In fact, you could never leave your room and Sarah Dunant would have painted a picture of this Renaissance city that would be as clear in your mind as if you were standing in the middle of the Duomo admiring the ceiling frescoes.
Alessandra is 14 years old when her father brings back a young painter from the North of Italy to adorn the chapel in the family’s newly completed palazzo, in a smart part of Florence. The city is in its boom time, with new buildings springing up everywhere, and the streets thick with artists employed to produce religious artworks on floors and ceilings. Alessandra is no slouch with a paintbrush herself, but she must keep her hobby secret because Florentine girls of this era are simply meant to sit around and wait for a husband and children. This precocious madam has no time for that sort of nonsense, of course, and all the time in the world for the in-house painter and the excitement of what is unfolding outside on the streets: the growing power of hellfire monk Savonarola.
If you like what Philippa Gregory does for historical England, you will love The Birth of Venus. Author Sarah Dunant weaves a tale of art, religion, heartbreak and hysteria that is unputdownable. I handed it to the Ginger once I’d finished and even he couldn’t put it down. For those of us who wonder how on earth you go about researching such a book, Sarah Dunant also includes “Notes on Writing A Historical Novel” at the back. In this essay she reveals the inspiration for the story: a girl in a fresco in Santa Maria Novella church my first stop on getting off the train in Florence!
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