The Birth of Venus: A Novel | Sarah Dunant

The Birth of Venus: A Novel | Sarah Dunant | As wonderful as promised

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The Birth of Venus...

	The Birth of Venus: A Novel Sarah Dunant Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 280 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Birth of Venus

This book takes you back through the years to 16th century Florence seen through the eyes of a young girl. It also provides an interesting insight into Italian politics and art of the time. Alessandra Cecchi is forced into an early marriage with a much older man who is homosexual but wants a son, while her true love is a young destitute painter that her father brings home to decorate their private chapel. The experiences she goes through make this book impossible to put down. A must read for lovers of historical fiction.

As wonderful as promised

I picked up this book a few years ago, and just last week reread a few chapters to see if I still liked the novel as much as I did when I first bought it. I'm happy to say that it is just as good the second time around, and even though I had had read the book before, I couldn't stop myself from reading beyond chapter three. I finished it again, and I think the reason I loved this book was the vivid descriptions of Renaissance Italy. Few historical fictions I've come across evoke the Italian Renaissance with such beauty.

The protagonist is an artist, and the author depicts her setting with a true artist's eye.

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great read

I thought this was the best book I have ever read. I have never read a novel by Sarah Dunant before, and was quite surprised at the depth of her writing. She is ingenious in her descriptions of the Rennaissance period, and the life of Alessandra. It was thrilling, deceptive, and told the story perfectly. I have now picked up several more of Sarah Dunant's novels, and I look foreward to reading more of her work. Fabulous book, couldn't put it down!!

Interesting...but not quite to my expectations.

I suppose that I held a bit more of an expectation for this novel than usual because of the time it sat on my bookshelf until I found the opportunity to read it...and perhaps that added to my slight disappointment in it. Although Dunant writes with a mostly smart and rather seductive language, I found myself a bit tired of all the "modern" twistings and soap-opera antics by midway through the book. At times, the main character Alessandra speaks as if dictating passages of a sexually repressed sixteen year old's diary, and being wrapped up in her thoughts took me away from the whole feel and magic of the Italian Renaissance. I enjoyed the story, but I could not immerse myself in the true history, beauty and the art of the era, which I had hoped would be a large part of the novel's intrigue.

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