The Birth Of Venus - Love And Death In Florence
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 family chapel in their Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by his talent. As Medici Florence is threatened by the hellfire of the monk Savonarola, the painter and his dazzling art exert an ever more powerful and erotic pull.