Sistine Heresy
Justine Saracen
Reviewed by Nan Hawthorne
With a couple unnecessary celebrity walk-ons and and unclear point, this novel is nonetheless enjoyable if you just read for the story.
Adriana is the widow and former mistress of two notorious Borgia men, Juan and Cesare respectively. The death of the two men's father, Pope Alexander, whose papal see was rife with corruption and lasciviousness, provides an entre for the Inquisition after its tour de force in Spain. The characters in this Renaissance Italian novel are, besides Adriana, the artist Michelangelo, castrato Domenico, and a young cross dressing artist in love with Adriana named Raphaella. The two sins the Inquisitor hates most are sodomy and the use of pagan images in art and ideas in science and philosophy. Our quartet is rife with both and the threat to them is constant. In the meantime, Michelangelo is painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Read simply as the love stories of Adriana and Raphaella and of Michelangelo and Domenico this novel is quite satisfying, set against a familiar setting of Rome just as the Reformation is starting elsewhere. The trouble is that it's all supposed to lead up to the "Sistine heresy", and the final resolution just doesn't live up to its promise. Throwing in Martin Luther and Leonardo Davinci's felt gratuitous to me. Otherwise the conflicts within and between the characters lack a coherrence the novel seems to promise. With all of Adriana's hearkening back to her earlier life, perhaps a longer novel, starting much earlier, would have given the author enough time to let us really see what was going on with the characters. What remains is one sad and frustrating love story and one rather delayed but sweet one.
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