The Birth of Venus (Dunant)
This is a not-bad coming-of-age story set in Florence during and after Savonarola's brief but ferocious anti-secular reign over the city. The protagonist is Alessandra, age 14, individualist and would-be artist, not at all happy about taking on the more traditional woman's role that her mother and elder sister are modelling for her. She barely has time to be intrigued by the young artist that is brought into their household (her father is a successful merchant) before Savonarola's opportunistic takeover begins and her marriage is hastily arranged with an older man who, it turns out, is the gay lover of her brother. Alessandra has a bad habit of wandering to unsafe places and into unsafe company (with the help of her Black maid Erila), and she eventually finds out that the young painter's secret is not - like her husband's - a sexual one, but an equally obsessive one with the human body as exposed through dissection. If I remember it correctly (and it has been some time since I finished), it was heavily implied that Michelangelo was one of the leading spirits of that scientific/secular movement. The young painter has a crisis of faith and she briefly "rescues" him into her husband's household and starts a sexual relationship with him, before things get more and more dangerous and everyone scatters to safer places. Her husband, who is actually a very attractive character, dies (I feared, given the hints being dropped, that he would be burned at the stake, but fortunately Dunant didn't go down that road); Alessandra ends up as a nun, and is allowed to practice her art and decorate the chapel; it was presumably well before she joined the convent that she acquired a body tattoo of a snake that shocks her fellow-nuns after her death (the framing story).
I'm not an expert on Renaissance Florence, but I thought the historical detail appeared to be researched and well-used; there were a few language slips that should have been caught by an editor (why do so many otherwise educated people have trouble with the difference between "flaunt' and "flout"?); and I acquiesce easily enough in an almost certainly historically inaccurate freedom of thought in a young female character. Dunant walks the line fairly successfully between what would have been historically accurate but difficult to read outright denunciation of the homosexual behaviour in the book and completely anachronistic acceptance of it. She does this by characterizing Alessandra's outrage (which is considerable) as mostly caused by her husband's (and her own family's) duplicity in not letting her know what she was walking into - especially the fact that her own brother is her rival. The description of Alessandra's wedding night is uncomfortable and fairly explicit without being outright ghastly.
This is not potboiler fiction; there is no enforced happy ending, and no use of the standard romance tropes. However, I found in it a lot of the cliche's of another genre, women's fiction in general. We must have our coming of age, our pregnancy and birth scenes described at length. There gets to be a certain sameness about all that, regardless of which historical era you set it in. Nonetheless, it was an amusing enough read, and I was at least engaged enough with Alessandra to be glad she finally had the opportunity to learn and express her art and raise her daughter quietly at a permissive and remote convent.
Recommended if you like women's fiction set in a vivid historical setting.
