Meeting Donatello

UPON AN AUTUMN TWILIGHT IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FIORENZA, RENZO, A CAPTAIN OF the Civic Militia, known this evening as Marco, attends a riunione riservata in honor of Maestro Donato. Within a lavish palazzo on Via Porta Rossa, the Florentine intellectual elite surrounds him-men who take delight not only in art but in one another. Amid poets, painters, and philosophers, he is drawn into a forbidden world where art and desire entwine, and his presence stirs admiration and intrigue.
The great sculptor welcomes him into the fold, whereupon he must needs reckon with a truth long left unspoken. By the time the night wanes from art and philosophy to veiled confessions, no longer is he merely an observer but bound to a hidden brotherhood, caught between duty and desire, between the rigid expectations of his station and the intoxicating domain he has entered.
In Meeting Donatello, a prequel to the Renaissance-set novel A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy, the reader is drawn into a world where art and longing are as perilous as they are beguiling, and where a single evening holds the power to shape a man's destiny. When Renzo returns home to Cortona, he shall not be the same.