Book Review: The Birth of Venus - Sarah Dunant

The Birth of Venus - Sarah Dunant

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 fundametalist 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.

3/5 stars (liked it)

Reading the first few pages really drew me in.  Alessandra is old and dead at the beginning and you want to find out her life story.  And we get sent back to when she is 15 years old.  She loves art but she lives in a time where women cannot be painters or artists.  Therefore she is forced to do art in hiding.  Then comes a young painter, hired by her father, to paint.  She is quickly drawn to him and wants to learn from him.  I loved learning some of the history and I truly liked Alessandra and wish some things had worked out differently for her.