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.

From the Hardcover edition.

Amazon.com Review
Sarah Dunant's gorgeous and mesmerizing novel, Birth of Venus, draws readers into a turbulent 15th-century Florence, a time when the lavish city, steeped in years of Medici family luxury, is suddenly besieged by plague, threat of invasion, and the righteous wrath of a fundamentalist monk. Dunant masterfully blends fact and fiction, seamlessly interweaving Florentine history with the coming-of-age story of a spirited 14-year-old girl. As Florence struggles in Savonarola's grip, a serial killer stalks the streets, the French invaders creep closer, and young Alessandra Cecchi must surrender her "childish" dreams and navigate her way into womanhood. Readers are quickly seduced by the simplicity of her unconventional passions that are more artistic than domestic:

Dancing is one of the many things I should be good at that I am not. Unlike my sister. Plautilla can move across the floor like water and sing a stave of music like a song bird, while I, who can translate both Latin and Greek faster than she or my brothers can read it, have club feet on the dance floor and a voice like a crow. Though I swear if I were to paint the scale I could do it in a flash: shining gold leaf for the top notes falling through ochres and reds into hot purple and deepest blue.

Alessandra's story, though central, is only one part of this multi-faceted and complex historical novel. Dunant paints a fascinating array of women onto her dark canvas, each representing the various fates of early Renaissance women: Alessandra's lovely (if simple) sister Plautilla is interested only in marrying rich and presiding over a household; the brave Erila, Alessandra's North African servant (and willing accomplice) has such a frank understanding of the limitations of her sex that she often escapes them; and Signora Cecchi, Alessandra's beautiful but weary mother tries to encourage yet temper the passions of her wayward daughter.

A luminous and lush novel, The Birth of Venus, at its heart, is a mysterious and sensual story with razor-sharp teeth. Like Alessandra, Dunant has a painter's eye--her writing is rich and evocative, luxuriating in colors and textures of the city, the people, and the art of 15th-century Florence. Reminiscent of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, but with sensual splashes of color and the occasional thrill of fear, Dunant's novel is both exciting and enchanting. --Daphne Durham

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 281 reviews)

Scents, Sights, and Sounds

I purchased this book with the intention that, like any other book I pick up on a whim, it would sit on an anxious, lonely 2" shelf space for about 6 months before I actually sat down to the job of reading it. However, fate had another course and I was invited to join a group of hunters out into the desert so I packed the newly aquired "piece" in my backback. Now, I'm not even remotely a huntress so I stuck to environs much more suitable for comfort and passivity (hunting is a geurre of kinds). Swaddled in a musty old blanket in the back of a "vintage" Airstream, guarded by two vanilla-haired vigilante hounds, I set off on a journey with an adolescent Florentine as my guide. The hunting party came back, shared their desperate and now deceased captives, and still I continued to read on. I finished the book by morning light and was in a haze through the remainder of the outting; beguiled by the descriptions of textiles (I hold a Bachelor of Science in Fashion), and intoxicated with the invocation of scents and sounds; vibrant evidences of well lived lives of a time gone by.
October 11, 2008

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.
September 22, 2008

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!!
September 13, 2008

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.
September 08, 2008

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.
September 05, 2008

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