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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2004, 416 pages
Paperback:
Dec 2004, 416 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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A compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion and power set in Florence during the Renaissance and told through the passionate voice of a heroine with the same vibrant spirit as her beloved city.
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. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities.
But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra's parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. 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. 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.
The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain's most innovative writers of literary suspense. 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.
Chapter 1
Looking back now, I see it more as an act of pride than kindness that my father brought the young painter back with him from the North that spring. The chapel in our palazzo had recently been completed, and for some months he had been searching for the right pair of hands to execute the altar frescoes. It wasn't as if Florence didn't have artists enough of her own. The city was filled with the smell of paint and the scratch of ink on the contracts. There were times when you couldn't walk the streets for fear of falling into some pit or mire left by constant building. Anyone and everyone who had the money was eager to celebrate God and the Republic by creating opportunities for art. What I hear described even now as a golden age was then simply the fashion of the day. But I was young then and, like so many others, dazzled by the feast.
The churches were the best. God was in the very plaster smeared across the walls in readiness for the frescoes: stories of ...
This is an obvious fit for those who've enjoyed other historical novels with an artistic bent, such as those by Susan Vreeland and Tracy Chevalier, and will doubtless be a popular book club choice. However, expect a little more harsh reality and a little less romance in Durant's book...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire
Sarah Dunant has given us a story of sacrifice and betrayal, set during Florence's captivity under the fanatic Savonarola. She writes like a painter, and thinks like a philosopher juxtapositioning the humane against the animal, hope against fanaticism, creativity against destruction. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force. Antonia Fraser
Simply amazing, so brilliantly written...almost intolerably exciting at times, and at others, equally poignant. Simon Schama
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. Dunant's snaky tale of art, sex and Florentine hysteria consumes utterly–but the experience is all pleasure.Sarah Dunant
is a novelist, broadcaster and critic. After leaving
university she worked as an actress before starting work as a
producer for BBC Radio in 1974. She also presented Radio
4's 'Woman's Hour' and BBC Television's 'The Late Show'.
She lives in London.
Bibliography
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