The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence
A Story of Botticelli
by Alyssa Palombo
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
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Pub Date Apr 25 2017 | Archive Date May 09 2017
St. Martin's Press | St. Martin's Griffin
Description
"In the tradition of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Palombo has married fine art with romantic historical fiction in this lush and sensual interpretation of Medici Florence, artist Sandro Botticelli, and the muse that inspired them all." - Booklist
A girl as beautiful as Simonetta Cattaneo never wants for marriage proposals in 15th Century Italy, but she jumps at the chance to marry Marco Vespucci. Marco is young, handsome and well-educated. Not to mention he is one of the powerful Medici family’s favored circle.
Even before her marriage with Marco is set, Simonetta is swept up into Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici’s glittering circle of politicians, poets, artists, and philosophers. The men of Florence—most notably the rakish Giuliano de’ Medici—become enthralled with her beauty. That she is educated and an ardent reader of poetry makes her more desirable and fashionable still. But it is her acquaintance with a young painter, Sandro Botticelli, which strikes her heart most. Botticelli immediately invites Simonetta, newly proclaimed the most beautiful woman in Florence, to pose for him. As Simonetta learns to navigate her marriage, her place in Florentine society, and the politics of beauty and desire, she and Botticelli develop a passionate intimacy, one that leads to her immortalization in his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus.
Alyssa Palombo’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence vividly captures the dangerous allure of the artist and muse bond with candor and unforgettable passion.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781250071507 |
| PRICE | $23.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 320 |
Featured Reviews
NikkiZoe n, Reviewer
Thanks St. Martins's and netgalley for this ARC.
Enlightenment, philosophy, and a maturity beyond her years makes Simonetta stand out from the start. An intimate view of the Medici’s and Florence's power struggle from within it's inner circle gives us a wider view of history. It's all about the people, republic, and how one woman may have changed history.
Zoe W, Reviewer
This is an intriguing interpretation about the life of Simonetta Cattaneo, a young, intelligent girl who became known as the "Most Beautiful Woman of Florence" and who developed a close, intimate relationship with the famous Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli.
It is a story about familial responsibilities, duty, strength, coming-of-age, friendship, art, passion, desire, loss and love.
Simonetta was a feminist ahead of her time who understood quickly that her beauty was both a gift and a curse, and who ultimately longed and strived in her regrettably short life to be known and loved for her knowledge and mind instead.
The prose is smooth and fluid, and the storyline takes us back to the mid-to-late 1400s to the city of Florence when politics, learning and the liberal arts were revered and who you knew was certainly more important than what you knew.
This certainly is a well written, vivid, rich story, and even though there is not much known about Simonetta's life and the events that led up to Botticelli's immortalization of her in his famous painting, Palombo has done a remarkable job of taking those historical facts and surrounding them with fiction that is passionate, alluring and incredibly captivating.
Thank you to NetGalley, especially St. Martin's Press, for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
Jodie S, Reviewer
It’s a short work, taking me just a few hours to read, and it’s hopefully not too much of a spoiler to say that there’s not much of a happy ending. But in that short, and sad, time, Palombo builds a wonderful portrait of Simonetta, a naive young woman who arrives in Florence only to find that all she desires comes with a price.
At its heart, this short novel focuses on the idea that beauty simply isn’t enough, and certainly isn’t sustainable. The Medici, for all their patronage of the arts, most definitely found that to be the case. And while The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence isn’t much of a high brow historical exploration of the fact, it’s still a well crafted piece of historical fiction, and I definitely found myself swept up in the romance of it all – true to history or not.
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