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Type of bind: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780739310533
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
ISBN number: 0739310534
Label: Random House Audio
Manufacturer: Random House Audio
Quantity: 1
Printing Date: February 17, 2004
Publishing house: Random House Audio
Release Date: February 17, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 246080
Studio: Random House Audio
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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 very 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 colour and the occasional thrill of fear, Dunant's novel is both exciting and enchanting. --Daphne Durham
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Rated by buyers 
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Dunant weaves what seems like a modern day soap opera into the entrancing story of Florence in the Renaissance. Her detailed descriptions of the city during that time captured me and I couldn't put this book down - it was a real treat! Yes, the story seems a little new age for that time and place but it might not have been as farfetched for that time and place as I or some other reviewers here think. The Renaissance was a raw awakening of the senses, and Dunant captures that not only in her vivid descriptions of the beautiful city of Florence but also in her characters who I connected with in so many different ways. The main cast centers on a family. Mainly the mother and her children the main character being Alessandra who is the youngest and is considered the "brainy" awkward teenager who is self conscience, her sister who is of course more beautiful and girly, and the two brothers - one who is a man's man and the other who is vain as well. The other main characters not in the family are the lovers of Alessandra and one of the brothers. The ending of this book was a somber delight. I loved this book and I hope you will enjoy as well - especially a good read if you are wanting to go to Florence or have been to Florence.
Rated by buyers -
I LOVE this book. It's about a girl's life in Florence during the Renaissance. It's really unpredictable, and keeps you engaged. It's really deep and intriguing, though I can see how for some maybe too much so. Anyway, I'm a big reader, and it's the best book I've ever read.
Rated by buyers -
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 Bachelour of Science in Fashion), and intoxicated with the invocation of scents and sounds; vibrant evidences of well lived lives of a time gone by.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers -
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!!
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