I am Rembrandt's Daughter by Lynn Cullen

Elisabeth, inexperienced and hardly the baby factory Felipe and his family bargained for, finds life at court a daily source of anxieties, mainly about pleasing her husband. Her ill-fated love affair parallels the life of another young woman: Elisabeth de Valois, third wife of King Felipe II, who at the tender age of 14 becomes her charge and student.įor both artist and queen, the gloomy Spanish court takes some getting used to. In Cullen’s story, when no marriage offer materializes from Sofonisba’s tryst in Rome, she accepts a different proposal: an appointment from the Spanish king to teach his latest wife “her colors”. Beginning in 1560, she would spend ten years as a lady-in-waiting and art teacher to the queen of Spain, abandoning her career at the height of her popularity.

As Sofonisba returns home in shame, terrified that Michelangelo will make her dishonor public, she remembers what her lover told her: “The Maestro has a few secrets of his own.”Įveryone has secrets in The Creation of Eve, Cullen’s lavishly detailed, sparkling recreation of a decade in the life of the real Sofonisba (1532-1625), once renowned throughout Italy as a leading painter of the Italian Renaissance. Sixteenth century Italy is not friendly to unmarried women who sleep with dashing young sculptors. The great maestro himself walked in on her and a fellow student in flagrante-but so far, has said not a word about it. It’s 1559, and Sofonisba Anguissola, a 27-year-old Italian artist invited to Rome to study with the great Michelangelo, has just blown the chance of a lifetime. Atlanta, Georgia author Lynn Cullen ( I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter, Moi and Marie Antoinette) makes a skillful-and, with any luck, permanent-jump into adult fiction with a suspenseful, evocative tapestry of Renaissance life, art, and royal skullduggery.

I am Rembrandt's Daughter by Lynn Cullen