Sarah Dunant

I have spent the last six years of my life time traveling. The place is Italy, the time five centuries ago. I have studied paintings and palaces. I have read private letters and public sermons. I have smelt perfumes and poisons, have run my fingers over thick velvets and tasted rich spiced sauces. And then - with all of this stewing in my imagination  - I have set out to put it on the page; to create novels which make you feel as if you are living in the magnificent, vibrant, brutal world of the renaissance.

“In the Company of the Courtesan”  began with a work of art, now in the Uffizi gallery in Florence but which once hung in a duke’s bedroom in the city of Urbino.  In this painting a gorgeous young woman clothed only in her hair lies languidly on a bed, a sleeping dog curled at her feet. She is gazing directly out at the viewer; her look both coy and explicit at the same time. An early version of a page three girl, or some subtle renaissance masterpiece? Titian’s “The Venus of Urbino”,  painted in Venice in the 1530’s and named after the duke who bought her to stick on his palace wall, has many claims to fame. Titian was Venice’s greatest painter and Venice was the most powerful city in Europe, politically stable and economically dazzling. But it doesn’t stop there. Because in terms of art history it is the look on the young woman’s face that makes her so celebrated.  Up until now, while renaissance painting had had its fair share of naked Venuses they had all been demure beauties, asleep or their eyes fixed elsewhere, apparently oblivious of the fact that they were being studied.  Not this Venus though. This tantalizing young woman knows exactly the impact that she is having on the men who stare at her - and what’s more, she is perfectly at ease with it.

The model for the painting was almost certainly a Venetian courtesan. (There are letters in Titian’s own hand telling us as much.) These were women whose job it was to make men’s mouth water.  In Catholic Europe illicit sex was, of course, a serious sin, but also a hugely popular one, made even more so by the quick fix of confession and the selling of pardons.  Even those who took vows of celibacy enjoyed the services of courtesans. Indeed it was the Papal court of Rome filled with wealthy, educated cardinals and priests where such women first became famous (remember, we are talking about an age when Popes kept mistresses and had strings of illegitimate children).

In the city of Venice,  courtesans were as vital to the city’s well-being as the waterways that ran through it. To keep the wealth of the ruling families from dissipating too fast, each generation sacrificed daughters to convents and sons to eternal bachelorhood. It was harder on the women than the men. These spoilt and pampered nobles were used to the comforts and culture  of home and were eager for a bit on the side without any pressure of marriage. Courtesans were the answer -  women of low birth but high wit, beauty and  training, cunning enough to keep their patrons well entertained and satisfied. Politicians, churchmen, bankers, writers, diplomats, rich merchants; they all sat at the courtesan’s table and put down the money to get into her bed and keep her in the manner to which,  for a while at least, she could become accustomed. Tell her story and you are also telling the story of a city, beautiful, powerful and corrupt; a portrait of the renaissance at its height.  What more could a novelist ask for?

I spent the best part of a year in the libraries, canals and back streets of Venice researching . The only question was, whose voice should I use to tell the story? With my first historical novel “The Birth of Venus”, the old nun who dies in suspicious circumstances at the beginning of the book becomes the young girl who narrates her own life story. Well educated, good with words, passionate about art but held back by her position as a woman, she was bursting to talk across the centuries.  But when it came to the Courtesan it wasn’t so easy. That woman on the bed was clearly smart, but she was operating outside acceptable society. Every time I tried to imagine myself inside her head her voice came out too modern. Yet the truth was more complex. The fact that women like Titian’s Venus were successful in 16th century Venice was not because they were in any way early feminists. Or at least not consciously. Their business was to do business: to look good, to dress well, to run a sophisticated house; all this took time and energy and called for a certain level of vanity and self-absorption. They were professionals and adventurers, making the moment work for them. And for most it was just a moment.  Their expenses were formidable and their hey-day was short:. study their wills and you find many died young in poverty. They simply did not have the time to dawdle or philosophise.

But if not through their voice, then whose? Most of the men were too besotted or corrupt. I needed someone with a clear head and an eye for the absurd as well as the romantic.  I found him in another painting, in the Academia Gallery in Venice.  (Art is the most precious research tool for anyone wanting to understand the renaissance. Having perfected perspective, they painted everything around them: palazzi, landscapes, city scenes, portraits, mythology and, of course, the bible. Their speciality was to relocate the stories to 15th century Italy and they did it so accurately that, as well recognizing portraits of leading thinkers, politicians and painters as extras in the crowds, historians can reconstruct the internal decoration of houses or the latest fashions of each decades by ‘reading” the art.)
This particular painting was a street scene of Venice by Vittorio Carpaccio  (part of the story of the life or St Ursula). There, in the middle background I spotted this small bandy legged figure, a dwarf about as big as the rich hunting dogs he was leading. He was finely dressed and with what seemed to me a quiet intelligence in his eyes.  A man standing on the edge of the scene, watching the world and its power games from a different perspective, an outsider yet someone whose exoticism gave him entrance to high places. He was perfect - not least because I already knew that he would have had access to the courtesans’ house. All such dubious establishments had need of entertainers and there are written records of courtesans who kept  “interesting pets” to amuse their clients; monkeys, parrots who had been taught to swear in different languages and yes, dwarfs for their wit and their skills at juggling.

Once I had their partnership I had the story. His voice, her body. The courtesan and her faithful majordomo, the model and the manager, beauty and beast, both of them sharper than they looked and cleverer and more hungry than most of the men they set out to dupe. Grifters, 16th century Venice style - until of course they get caught.    

Any good novel, whether set in the past of the present,  has to keep you guessing, make you want to turn the page. As readers, you will know this as well as any writer. Before I became intoxicated by history I wrote thrillers.  Transgressions - a woman alone in her house where strange things start to happen….  malice or mischief?  Mapping the Edge - someone who leaves home for a weekend and never comes back. Missing,  but does that mean dead?  How does one find out? What impact does the fear have on those left behind? While people may have lived differently in the past, how they felt, how they reacted to danger, threat , love, loss, grief, pain - those things remain the same. The building blocks of what makes a good story cross centuries, and betrayal and secrets can blow apart a relationship in whatever age you are writing about.  

So “In the Company of the Courtesan” like “The Birth of Venus” before it,  is, I hope, both a thrilling read and a way for you to do your own time travelling. Having spent the last half decade there, I can promise you there is nowhere more colorful, exotic and satisfying than Italy during the renaissance. Art and artifice. Beauty and brutality.  Creativity and corruption. The sins of pleasure and the pleasures of sin. Start by looking into the eyes of Titian’s courtesan’. They speak volumes.