Search - Leonardo's Swans

This book was recommended to me by a friend in Italy where it's a runaway bestseller and has been lauded by critics and art historians. Through the story of the brilliant Este princesses whose place in history is all but forgotten, the author manages to bring Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance into blazing technicolor. I was fascinated to learn the circumstances under which Leonardo created The Last Supper, The Virgin of the Rocks, The Mona Lisa, and The Lady with an Ermine, and other famous paintings conceived while he was in Milan. Also, it chronicles the rise and fall of some of the gigantic personalities that made the Renaissance what it was. No mysterious codes here, just fabulous, meticulously researched historical fiction that keeps you turning pages.

Reading this recent historical fiction novel was a very strange experience – it’s based on the same historical facts as another book, ‘Duchess of Milan’ by Michael Ennis – which I love. So reading this book was almost like re-reading ‘Duchess’… but feeling that everything, has, somehow, changed… Although, I believe, factually accurate, Essex’s book is much less flattering to her characters, I believe. Both focus on the two sisters, Beatrice and Isabella d’Este, who were prominent players in the Renaissance courts of Italy’s late 15th century (and were patrons to Leonardo Da Vinci and many other artists of the day.) But while Ennis portrays these women as the well-educated, powerful, and savvy politicians that they likely were (without sacrificing a strong element of personal drama), Essex has the women be much more motivated by personal jealousy and vanity – their connivings are shown as more petty games than far-sighted political moves. They are constantly worrying about who is more beautiful than whom, who their husbands are sleeping with, and even Isabella’s main goal of being painted by Da Vinci is equal parts vanity and desire to ‘get one over’ on her sister. Isabella came across as shallow and irritating – which, I’m fairly sure, historically, she was not.
The other annoying thing about this book is that Essex obviously did some of the research for this book by looking at existing portraits and carvings of her characters, an she spends a great deal of time in the book describing in great detail her personal interpretations of these artworks. OK, so she got me to do a Google image search for some of the works she described, so I guess she succeeded in getting me to want to look at them. But it got to the point where at times I felt like I was reading a museum didactic, not a novel.
Overall, this wasn’t bad – but I would definitely recommend ‘Duchess of Milan’ over this book any day!