''The sad fact is that though Florence is rife with painters I have never met one,'' she confides.
The painter's arrival springs the novel's plot, for Alessandra has two passions, and one of them is art. Along with bolts of the richest fabrics, he has acquired a bewildered young painter - an orphan from ''a monastery on the edge of the northern sea where the water threatens the land'' - who has been persuaded to live with the Cecchi family while carrying out the decoration of their private chapel. But before we read a word, we know two things about Sister Lucrezia: she is neither virtuous nor honest.Īlessandra Cecchi (Sister Lucrezia's name in the world) begins her recollections in the year 1492, which she remembers well ''because Lorenzo de' Medici died that spring.'' She is 14 years old, and her father, a wealthy cloth merchant, has just returned from a buying trip. It's hard to imagine that any reader wouldn't eagerly turn the page and start right in on the ''Testament of Sister Lucrezia,'' which will doubtless explain how a smart girl from a rich family wound up with an indecent tattoo and a faked disease in a convent far from her home. The second shock, revealed when the younger sister tears open the dead woman's shift ''in a single rip until the corpse was revealed naked on the bed,'' is a tattooed line that thickens, ''rounding itself out from a tail into the body of a snake, silver green in color.'' This serpent curls down the nun's torso until, ''at the point where the snake's body became its head, instead of the reptilian skull was the softer, rounder shape of a man's face: the head thrown back, the eyes closed as if in rapture and the tongue, snake-long still, darting out from his mouth downward toward the opening of Sister Lucrezia's sex.'' As they remove her habit, the sisters are astonished to discover that the tumor, from which the dying woman suffered mightily in her last days, is actually a pig's bladder, purposefully secreted beneath the cloth to simulate evidence of a disease Sister Lucrezia did not have.
Two nuns are assigned the task of preparing for burial the corpse of Sister Lucrezia, who, after 30 years of seclusion, piety and prayer, has died from a tumor on her breast. SARAH DUNANT'S seventh novel opens on a hot summer day in 1528, inside a convent east of Florence.
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