Magnificent

It’s the best word I can think of to describe Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus, a book that tells a compelling, sensual, and exciting story against the backdrop of social and political upheaval in 15th century Florence. I don’t remember the Renaissance and Reformation being nearly this interesting when I learned about them in school (or maybe I just never learned about them since I never took a lot of history courses).

In a prologue, Dunant introduces us to Sister Lucrezia, a nun dying of breast cancer. Cleaning her body after her death, the sisters are astonished to see a tattoo of a snake, “so lifelike that by the time it had slid its way over the breast you might swear you could see the movement of the muscle rippling under the skin...”

How did Sister Lucrezia come to have such a tattoo? Her story is a long tale of love, betrayal, and lust; art, religion, and politics, beginning when Alessandra (who would become Sister Lucrezia) is only 14 and her father brings a painter to the family home to “glorify the chapel.” Over the next few years, Florence comes apart at the seams as a fanatical monk, Girolamo Savonarola takes power after the death of Lorenzo de Medici. Alessandra marries a man thirty years her senior, but her intellectual equal, as a way of protecting herself from the repression growing all around her and (she thinks) having the life of art and books that she wants. Of course, life is never as simple as it seems.

Alessandra, her slave Erila, and her mother are strong, independent women at a time when women were thought of as little more than chattel. Her husband Cristofalo and the painter are likewise interesting and sympathetic characters, in stark contrast to Alessandra’s brothers Tomaso and Luca.

There are many times in this book when the conversations seem like they are taking place in the 21st century rather than the 15th, but this is a minor complaint. Overall, the story completely drew me in and held me till the very end.