Like Ghostanza, who uses her powders and salves to mask her decaying body, Howard’s richly poetic language puts a gloss on the harsh world her characters inhabit. Still, the aging Ghostanza continues to paint her face everyday, enlisting Flavia to track down a substitute for her Venetian cerussa, the lead-based cream she uses to hide her skin’s flaws.
To someone who believes being admired gives a woman life, to be shut up is a kind of death.
She mocks Flavia, lashes out at the sisters, scorns her adopted city for not being as sophisticated as her beloved Venice, and physically attacks her stepson and his wife during one of their visits. But Ghostanza’s beauty masks a vicious heart. THE ORNATRIX is suffused with the kind of specific detail that makes the best historical fiction come alive."įlavia is drawn to the convent’s mysterious and alluring resident, and before long she becomes the mercurial Ghostanza’s ornatrix, the handmaiden responsible for her toilette. "Howard’s richly poetic language puts a gloss on the harsh world her characters inhabit. Once married to one of the city’s wealthiest men, her dead husband’s son has sent her to live with the nuns until she learns “to wear the face God gave you.” She’s summarily shipped off to the convent of Santa Giuliana, where she’ll serve her penance by working as a servant.Īlso cloistered at Santa Giuliana is Ghostanza Dolfin, a former Venetian courtesan so beautiful “it does not seem possible she belongs to a world of people who sweat and burn and itch.” Like Flavia, Ghostanza is an outsider, walled up with the nuns because her appearance - a carefully constructed mask of makeup, hair dye and other 16th-century beauty treatments - threatens the established social order. Living in near-total seclusion and at odds with her family, the teenage Flavia’s long-simmering jealously explodes just before her younger sister’s wedding. How far are you willing to go to be beautiful? That timeless question is at the heart of THE ORNATRIX, Kate Howard’s twisted and engrossing debut novel set in 16th-century Italy.įlavia di Maestro Bartofolo is a dyer’s daughter, and the bird-shaped birthmark on her face is an affliction that her mother, the pious Mona Grazia, is determined to hide from the outside world.
0 kommentar(er)
