Books: Worth 1,000 Words?

Who says the book business doesn't care about art anymore? It's not the art of fiction we have in mind here. It's fiction that manages to work in a few Italian frescoes or a Dutch still life. Stirred by the success of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, about a household servant who inspires Vermeer, publishers have rushed in with titles like Christopher Peachment's Caravaggio; Will Davenport's The Painter, about Rembrandt; and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Way to Paradise, about Gauguin. As a rule, the books are intelligent, sometimes even ingenious, but in most, the underlying formula is plain: art plus sex. So Chevalier's new best seller, The Lady and the Unicorn, features Nicolas des Innocents, painter, tapestry designer and Renaissance stud--a guy who puts the pig in pigment.

This new generation of art novels is different from Lust for Life (about Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (Michelangelo). Irving Stone's old blockbusters were the testosterone-laden version of art history. The central voice now is more likely to be a woman's. In Sarah Dunant's agile new novel, The Birth of Venus (Random House; 394 pages), the fictional narrator is Alessandra Cecchi, 14, the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant in the Florence of Michelangelo and Botticelli. Alessandra yearns to live with a brush in her hand. For that matter, she would be happy just to get out of the house. But it's the 1490s, so her best hope is an agreeable arranged marriage. Meanwhile, her closest girlfriend is her worldly-wise black slave. (Jada Pinkett Smith, call your agent.) And her instructor in the ways of the world is a morally ambiguous but ultimately sympathetic gay man.

That world is full of dangers. Charles VIII of France is preparing to march on the city. The fanatical monk Savonarola is raging from the pulpit against lust and luxury. His religious police, a kind of Christian Taliban, will soon be enforcing godliness with a cudgel, punishing sodomists and chasing women indoors. The turmoil outside interests Alessandra, but what really absorbs her is the young painter her father has brought from Northern Europe to decorate the family chapel. For a while you wonder if this mysterious stranger will somehow turn out to be Albrecht Durer, who ventured to Italy--though not to Florence--in 1494. He doesn't, though Dunant probably wouldn't mind if you pictured Durer's liquid eyes during the scenes when the discussion of single-point perspective dissolves into the sfumato of orgasm. But however strong the scent of commercial calculation in Dunant's book--there's nothing like the Renaissance to give tone to sex and bloodshed--it turns out to be a beguiling story.