![]() ![]() ![]() So, cursed with excessive wit and artistry, this young Florentine is highly vulnerable to the surly attractions of the painter her upwardly mobile father has brought home from the gray reaches of northern Europe to do up the family chapel. Fourth and favorite child of a prosperous silk manufacturer and his highly cultured wife, Alessandra Cecchi is far less conventionally attractive than her sister, but she’s got her mother’s brains and a powerful craving to make art. How such things came to be are revealed in a retracing of the late nun’s youth, flowering, and de-flowering following the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The breast cancer that was thought to have killed her was neither cancerous nor mammary, and her aged monastic corpse was lavishly decorated with a most vivid and decidedly impious serpent. ![]() The postmortem ablutions of Sister Lucrezia reveal surprises. British author Dunant ( Mapping the Edge, 2001, etc.) weaves everyone’s favorite art history moments into a vivid tapestry of life on the Arno during the upheaval of the Renaissance. ![]()
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