If Florence, then Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus.

The book, like the city, is not as good as it should be given everything, but is better than we have any right to expect given everything.

From Dante to Michelangelo, in a little town on a minor river halfway along a mountainous peninsula of Europe. An unlikely place for an unprecedented flowering of human fecundity. But, when you think about it, no more unlikely than, say, a cave in central France that would come to be called by the name of a village (Lascaux) that didn’t exist for another 20,000 years after it saw a similar outburst of creativity.

Sarah Dunant puts us well in Florence ca. 1500. Botticelli is there, alive, aging in the distance though his work plays a central role in the story she has to tell. A very young Michelangelo makes a brief appearance. But the hope and glory of re-birth is sundered by the fire and brimstone sermons and laws of Savonarola.

On this ground of the famous and the infamous, Dunant weaves a tapestry of richness and color using a a simple, unexpected, but revealing premise. Suppose a daughter of one of the rich Florentine merchants was artistically gifted, what then?

A story of compelling, utterly convincing social, sexual, political, religious, and artistic complexity unfolds before the mind’s eye as the child Alessandra Cecchi moves through and comes to her troubled maturity in this messy, beautiful, raucous, pious, ribald small city that is the epicenter of human creativity at the time.

Everywhere around her is art, much of it so new the paint is hardly dry. Dunant’s extensive research serves her and the reader well as she with easy virtuosity fills in the needed detail of everyday life, both that of ordinary citizens and that of the artists themselves. What was for dinner? How were the brushes made from whose bristles the frescoes sprang? What were Ethiopians doing in 15th century Florence? What was the reality of the gay demimonde at the time?

Most extraordinary is the telling of the story from a woman’s viewpoint. No genteel Austen-like delicacy here. Alessandra is a talented, self-aware person given a thorough education in the "new learning" (meaning Greek philosophy) by her enlightened parents, but inhabiting a social world so tightly constrained that she cannot go anywhere unescorted.

Her father brings into the household a young artist from Holland whose job is to create frescoes for the new family chapel. Known only as "the painter," the strange young man becomes the linchpin of events and revelations that intertwine the family, the city, and the world of Renaissance Europe.

Not the least of the novel’s attractions for an American reader just now is Savonarola. Firebrand preachers we apparently we shall always have with us. It’s at first breathtaking and then appalling to encounter one who, in the midst of one of the great expressions of human creativity, almost managed to stop the whole show and turn Florence into a fascist theocracy. The contemporary reader, whether inside or outside of America, will find much food for disturbing thought, given the global theocratic urgencies of the current American rulers.