Sarah Dunant

The Sunday Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Italian Renaissance novels The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan and Blood and Beauty has an exceptional talent for breathing life into history. Sarah Dunant has now turned her discerning eye to the foremost female art collector and patron of the Renaissance – Isabelle d’Este, the Marchesa of Mantua. The result? Renaissance history at its most vivid. 

With her trademark energy and stage-magnetism, Sarah Dunant reveals all about her latest dive into the 15th and 16th centuries, that mixes historical fiction with biography, scholarship and imagery of both the people and the time. It is also a meditation on our attitude to history itself, challenging how far we can set aside our own values and certainties when it comes to understanding those who grew out of very different cultural soil.