It was while she was immersing herself in the art galleries of Florence that the character of Alessandra, the heroine of her book The Birth of Venus, suggested itself to her. Alessandra is a child of the Renaissance, an artist whose family looks on her talents with suspicion, who eventually marries herself to God because that is the only way she can truly be free to paint.

Dunant found Fiammetta, the courtesan heroine of her latest novel, in a painting by Titian. The front cover of In the Company of the Courtesan (Time Warner) is a detail from the painting, Venus of Urbino, which features a voluptuous young woman reclining nude on a couch.

While the naked female body had become a commonplace in paintings of the time - always dressed in the respectability of mythological character, of course - those women were almost always demurely looking away. Not the Venus of Urbino.

"They never confront you, whereas she looks straight at you," says Dunant. "She's kind of going 'Here I am, I'm naked, if you'd like to discuss that further I'm up for talking about it.' "

"And I thought OK, if you're a courtesan, that picture suddenly looks different because not only are you saying 'Do you want to talk about it,' you're also saying 'because I'm OK with who I am here.' I think she has that quality, there's such a confidence to her. And then I thought 'that's the character I want to write about.' Suddenly she was not a painting, she was a novel."

Dunant, 55, was a well-known author of thrillers before she turned her hand to historical fiction. She believes historical novels feel more real to the reader if they're told in the first person, but she knew she didn't want Fiammetta to tell the story.

"(Courtesans) were not early feminists, they really had to work hard to keep their positions and it was every woman for themselves, so there's no sisterhood here. They have to be beautiful, they have to be vain, they have to be smart, they have to be quite self-preoccupied and they just have to be really out there to get what they can get. And that's not the makings of a very sympathetic character, but it is the makings of a quite adventurous, interesting woman."

Dunant found her narrator, the dwarf Buchino, in Venice in a series of paintings by Carpaccio. ("If you wanted to write a novel of this period you can just sit in these rooms and read the paintings," she says). From a bandy-legged figure standing next to a dog who was nearly as tall as he was, she invented an ugly outsider who is the courtesan's best friend.

"They're a great partnership because without her he couldn't live, but also without him she couldn't live. He runs the house, he runs the whole business."

The book opens with the sack of Rome by German Protestants, with help from Spanish mercenaries, in 1526. Fiammetta flees the carnage with Buchino, and the two end up in Venice, a wealthy Catholic trading centre with a pragmatic attitude toward courtesans.

Dunant provides an interesting view of medicine of the age - a healer is brought in to take care of wounds Fiammetta suffered at the hands of the Protestants - and then walks readers through the steps a courtesan had to take to set herself up in business, including finding clients in church. Buchino and Fiammetta prosper and find love, which proves tragic on all sides.

Interestingly enough, while Buchino can be quite bawdy at times, In the Company of the Courtesan is no Kama Sutra - there's no sex in it at all. That's partly because Buchino is never invited into Fiammetta's bedroom. But it is also deliberate.

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