The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant
3 Rating(s)
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The Birth of Venus

Author: Sarah Dunant

Narrator: Jenny Sterlin

Abridged: 6 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/17/2004


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Rebecca on 2007-06-26 17:37:48

I really tried to like this book, but ultimately I could not even finish it. It was a little boring for me, I wanted the plot to advance more quickly. Had the story been advanced sooner, I could have withstood the period-appropriate-but-nevertheless-annoying chauvinistic attitudes of the men in the story, but at some point I felt that was all I was getting and I just put it down for good.