Description

Alessandra Cecchi isn't quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A young 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 susceptible to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who's seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between your Medici state, using its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary fans.