A 15-century sculpture of the Virgin links these three alternating
stories, all set amidst the mystery and splendor of Venice. Into
three men's lives, and over five centuries, the stone madonna
brings an equal amount of sexual ecstasy and misery; she's really a
bloodless monument to the old whore/virgin complex - a dichotomy
still rich in meaning for the rather bloody-minded Unsworth (author
most recently of The Idol Hunters and The Rage of the Vulture).
Pity poor Girolamo Satta, the luckless sculptor of the unheralded
masterpiece. His lengthy letter to his patron begging help - here
reproduced in full - reveals both the reason why he's in jail and
soon to be hanged and also why his work will later languish in
obscurity. It seems he's charged with murdering his model, Bianca
the prostitute, whom he's known quite well in the biblical sense,
often while she was still in New Testament garb. Small wonder,
then, that Simon Raikes, restoring the holy icon in 1972, discovers
a strange sensation emanating from it. As he removes the
accumulated grime, he grows wildly priapic, aroused even by his
grandmotherly landlady. He's especially tumescent, though, for the
mysterious Chiara Litsov, an artist's wife, who may or may not
provide clues to the statue's unusual provenance. Between the
sculptor's and restorer's narratives, Unsworth slips in the erotic
history of another rake, the destitute 18-century patrician Ziani,
hard at work on his scandalous memoirs, lengthy excerpts of which
record his encounter with the madonna. Under her gaze, he
deflowered her wealthy old owner's virgin bride. While the main
plot - Raikes' exploration in sacred and profane lust - dissolves
into a deliberately open-ended mystery, the other two sad stories
end in predictable tragedy. Both Girolamo's prison letters and
Ziani's death-bed memoirs never reach their intended audiences;
they're intercepted by members of the same evil-minded Venetian
family that spawned Raikes' heart-throb, the ruthless Mrs. Litsov,
nee Fornarini. The book's fundamental implausibility - Unsworth's
recreation of supposedly destroyed documents - shouldn't deter
readers on the lookout for some lightly instructional, solidly
middlebrow fiction. (Kirkus Reviews)
When conservationist Simon Raikes goes to Venice to restore a statue of the Madonna, he is unprepared for the effect this stone virgin's strange, seductive beauty and mysterious past will have on his life.
As he gradually peels away the layers of dirt from the statue, he becomes increasingly haunted by its potent history of sexual passion, greed, treachery and murder. Modelled on a beautiful prostitute in fifteenth-century Venice, its sculptor paid with his life when he fell in love with her. Then, in the eighteenth century, a lecherous nobleman consummated an illicit affair beneath the statue, recalled in salacious detail in his memoirs. As Simon becomes caught in the heady sexual spell of the Madonna's story, he is also increasingly attracted to an enigmatic Italian woman, Chiara, the wife of a sculptor, and realizes that the stone virgin's violent and erotic past is once again invading the present.
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