Phoenixes and Sphinxes: Ladies of the Renaissance in Poetry, Paintings, and Life

Love, lust, the painting of the Italian Renaissance, lute music, death and violence, sonnets and poems, prayers and fears – this is what filled the lives of outstanding women from the new book by Sofia Bagdasarova. Some of them were models for painters and muses for poets, while others wrote poems and paintings themselves. They gaze at us from the canvases of Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian, and their barely discernible voices resonate for us thanks to early printed books of the 15th-16th centuries, where their poems were published. The novellas presented in this book reconstruct for us the history of their lives, telling of the inspiration they awakened in men, and the right to creativity and freedom for which these women fought themselves. The text of this peculiar historical novel with fifteen heroines interconnected by familial and cultural ties is richly supplemented with works of Renaissance art. They are accompanied by a substantial art historical commentary. Thanks to this combination, the figures of the book's characters become even more fascinating, and the history of art in the Renaissance era becomes more human and understandable.