A young girl in Renaissance Florence must choose between her artistic aspirations and society's demands.

The first hundred pages of this book annoyed the bloody hell out of me. Dunant flits between past and present tense, seemingly at random. She starts off in past tense. She quickly shifts to present tense and stays there for quite some time before switching back to past tense in the middle of a paragraph. Repeat x22. (Which is probably an exaggeration, but you get my drift).

And then, about a hundred pages in, she stops doing it. Bam. Suddenly the entire book is in the past tense, with occasional present-tense references to the other characters. (Not all of these make sense in context, but they're not as jarring as the back and forth was).

I've got to say, it was quite readable from thereon out. Dunant's prose is smooth and straightforward when she's not playing dodgy games with tense, and I appreciated the way she developed the historical setting. I do love Renaissance Italy, and it was nice to be back there. I felt that Dunant did a good job of capturing just what it would have felt like to be a young woman in Savonarola's Florence. I also enjoyed all the artistic references, though I must say I was expecting more of them in a book named after one of the most famous paintings in Western art.

So it wasn't a bad book after those first hundred pages, but I didn't find it particularly compelling. I never came to feel for Alessandra, and I felt like Dunant could have done a lot more with the rest of the characters. She introduces some really interesting scenarios, then fails to do much with them. I'd have loved some more insight into everything that passed between Alessandra and Cristoforo, in particular; it's a shame that Dunant mostly glosses over their relationship. The romance, too, fell flat for me, and I was disappointed with the way the murder subplot was resolved.

So that's that. It's a readable book with a nicely developed setting, but the rest of it leaves something to be desired. If you'd like to take a short jaunt through Renaissance Florence, it's worth borrowing from the library, but I wouldn't say it's one to buy.

(A longer version of this review originally appeared on my blog, Stella Matutina). ( )

This is not a book I would have ordinarily picked up. I'd heard it was kind of like Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, but it's really not at all. Yes, it's about a woman and a painter in Europe, but that's about where the similarity ends. In truth, I have no idea where the title comes from, except that it's a famous painting from the same era. Anyway, this is the life story of Alessandra Cecchi, an unusually well-educated Florentine woman in the Renaissance. Her whole life she has dreamed of becoming an artist, but such things are not considered proper for a woman. Though she is irresistibly drawn to a painter hired to paint her family's chapel, her parents marry her off to a much older man. At the same time, the brutally fundamentalist monk Savonarola has come to power, bringing terror to the city under the guise of piety.

This is an extremely passionate and graphic book. Everything is described in vivid detail, from the violence to the sex to the art. If you can handle the mental images, this is a marvelously written story. Alessandra is a believable and sympathetic narrator, progressive and intelligent without being anachronistic. The story is compelling, sometimes suspenseful, often thought-provoking. There were times when I had a lot of trouble putting it down. I will definitely be looking up Dunant's other works. ( )

I loved this book! ( )

I own a Dutch translation of the book made by Tinke Davids.
I must stay it is utterly awful. There are a plethora of annoying mistakes and some sentences do not work very well due to wording.
It was like reading a ten year old's essay. Poorly constructed sentences, not an agreeable read on a technical level.

I don't know if the original text gives off the same vibe, but it was quite frankly a very boring read.
Entire passages didn't seem to get a move on, a lot of things were unnecessarily stretched out. Even the so-called 'intelligent' conversations were steeped in banality.

I'd recommend The Agony and the Ecstasy by Stone well above this one if you want to read fiction on Florence set in the Savonarola/Medici age. ( )

Once again, Sarah Dunant spins a masterful tale of life long ago, starting in Florence in the 1480’s. We enter the life of Alessandra Cecchi, a 14 year old girl who is sadly, too developed for her time. She loves to learn, speaks multiple languages, has no talent for dancing, and above all, she loves art.

Alessandra has inherited her love of color from her father, a clothing merchant renowned for his vibrant cloths and she yearns for the secret of color. While most young women learn to sew and prepare to be mothers, Alessandra sketches scenes from the bible and other images she can conjure up in her mind. She yearns to explore the beautiful city she lives in, to feel what it must be like to be a man in a time of great change, both politically and culturally.

To read the rest of my review, please visit:
http://www.dorolerium.com/?p=675 ( )