Renaissance woman: a female artist finds sanctuary in marriage to a gay man in the Medici-era novel The Birth of Venus.

The Birth of Venus * Sarah Dunant * Random House * $21.95

Alessandra Cecchi is an ungainly girl of 16 with a passion for drawing. She has talent as well, "truth" in her eye and hand, according to the young painter her father has hired to decorate the family chapel. But this is Savonarola's Florence, where the "Angels" gang roam the streets enforcing the curfew and women are turned away a the doors of the Cathedral. Already the Sumptuary Laws against ostentatious display are being enforced with vigor, the poor eager to see the rich stripped of their fur collars and pearl-entrusted combs. The army of Charles VIII is streaming toward the gates of the city, and Alessandra's mother insists that young girls aren't safe. Her good family won't protect her. She must marry at once or enter a convent. So what if the groom is a stranger to everyone but her handsome brother Tomaso?

English author and former TV-radio personality Sarah Dunant's eighth novel, The Birth of Venus would be a simpler, harsher, and shorter book if Alessandra had, like many girls in her position, no choices. But her unusual intelligence attracts a cultivated, much older husband who will allow her to make art--something she'd had to hide from her own family--and even take a lover if she is discreet. He grants her these freedoms in exchange for his own. After a miserable consummation involving a cold smear of quattrocento K-Y, he confesses that he is a sodomite, in love with her brother, and hoping to ward off the army of God with this marriage. In another world Alessandra would divorce him. But there is no other world. She chose him over the convent and now has to make the best of being his shapely, Medici-inspired beard.

One of the pleasures of good historical fiction is the seamless introduction of period details. A writer who shows too much delight in foods or clothes or manners of the past only underlines the months of research behind the book. Readers can feel him nudge in their ribs. Although rich in these kinds of details--Alessandra's father is a cloth merchant, whose fortunes dip with the new, severe fashion of piety--The Birth of Venus is much more than a Renaissance photo album. Beautifully balanced between the dramatic historical events and Alessandra's quieter but no less dramatic story, it "allows for character depth alongside a subtle vein of suspense. By the end you find yourself accepting stranger stories than a dwarfish Dominican friar's takeover of a pleasure loving city.

Marter's next book, Queer Beats, will be published in June.