And from medieval tapestries, I move on to Titian's Venus

In the Company of the Courtesan ***1/2
By Sarah Dunant

In 1527, the prostitute Fiammetta Bianchini and her dwarf servant, Bucino, flee the sack of Rome and rebuild their business in Venice in this high-class jewel heist mystery.

Dunant's Venice is strewn with real historical artifacts--the Venus of Urbino by Titian for whom Fiammetta is the model; fake jewels produced by the Murano glass factories; a book depicting sexual positions with accompanying dirty sonnets that has been banned in Rome. (Prostitutes and artists have a long association. Click the pic for a recent Reuter's article about this topic.)

Venice itself is the main character of the novel, a kind of Shopkeeper Queen, willing to let unsavory businesses and heresies thrive on a small scale so long as they stay under the wire and don't attract Church authorities. She is Fiammetta writ large, in a way.

The Shopkeeper Queen herself relies on her husband the Doge to deal with her subjects so she herself can go about the business of preparing pilgrims for their trip to the Holy Land, trading or fighting with the Turks as circumstances demand, and generally greasing the wheels of commerce.

Characters swirl around the Shopkeeper Queen's canals, piazzas, churches and campos, their fortunes rising and falling, of concern to Queen Venice only where the supply and demand are out of balance. Besides Fiammetta and Bucino, the book is full of colorful characters--a blind healer specializing in keeping whores youthful and disease-free; a Turk collecting curiosities and lovielies, including human ones, for Suleyman's court; the clientele of the high-class brothels; the gangs allowed to street fight on special holidays; the men who dredge the canals when sewage build-up impedes commerce; the Jews in the Ghetto, cutting endless deals with the Shopkeeper Queen to maintain their relative safe haven and earn a living, but not too good a one.

The cavalcade of images and characters above ought not to suggest that the book is poorly plotted or devoid of human drama. There are unexpected turns of events aplenty, appearances by all Seven Deadly Sins, and the gamut of human emotions from love to hate, from fear to courage.

Dunant's well-tailored narrative style seems almost wasted on what amounts to high-class pulp fiction. Lookit this description of Rome, where the book opens, for instance: "On the evening streets, our louche, loud city had closed up like a clam." My gosh, alliterates and everything!

But even the first-person narrative by the dwarf Bucino does not save the novel from a kind of detached point of view, as if we are seeing people and events from the eyes of Venice itself. Without her, the rest would simply not exist.