|
Product Description
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.
Features
- Fiction
- Historical
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel
- Blood and Beauty: A Novel About the Borgias
- The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall
- The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo
- Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture
- Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy
- The Italians
- The Tigress of Forli: Renaissance Italy's Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de' Medici
- In the Name of the Family: A Novel
- Sacred Hearts: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle)
*If this is not the "The Birth of Venus: A Novel (Reader's Circle)" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 4, 2024 05:30 +08.