The Birth of Venus Sarah Dunant Little, Brown, 412pp, £12.99 ISBN 0316725498

To start with an admission. I have never much liked Sarah Dunant's crime thrillers. Full of obsession and sex, there was an overblown, overripe quality to her writing that left me cold. But here, at last, Dunant has discovered her metier in the form of a historical melodrama. Or, more precisely, in writing history-as-fiction. Set your story in fanatical times, where the Devil is a palpable presence and, it seems, from the evidence of this novel, you can be as overblown and overripe as you like without losing the sympathy of a sceptical reader.

Dunant has certainly done her research on renaissance Italy, where artistic creativity and intellectual curiosity are in full flower. In Florence, however, the puritanical monk Savonarola is stirring up the people against lust and greed and the excesses of the Church, resulting in the burning of works of art and books (one of the paintings under threat is none other than Botticelli's The Birth of Venus). In this febrile environment, homosexuality is chosen for particular obloquy.

The Birth of Venus starts with a mystery. A respected nun dies from what is thought to be cancer. Against her wishes that her body remain untouched, her clothes are burnt and the corpse disinfected, at which point the nuns discover that her tumour was not cancer but a rotting pig's bladder fixed to her chest. Even more surprising, they discover a silver-green snake tattooed over her aging body, weaving its way across her shoulders and around her nipples before plunging "downward towards the opening of [her] sex".

Sister Lucrezia's secret testament is the story of this book. Born Alessandra Cecchi, the youngest child of a Florentine cloth merchant, she is, in fact, the bastard daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici. A talented artist but a cuckoo in the nest, Alessandra, at the age of 15, is hastily married off to art collector Christoforo Langella, who it turns out is a homosexual. The family, fearful of the proximity of the French army in 1494, accepts the 48-year-old confirmed bachelor as the protector of their daughter against possible dishonour at the hands of the soldiers. The rise of the demonic Savonarola endangers them all.

Dunant's novel, like Orhan Pamuk's celebrated My Name Is Red (Faber), begins with a corpse and is set in a period of religious repression. It, too, tackles larger themes such as the role of art in society and religion. The artist who fathers Alessandra's illegitimate daughter and first paints the snake on her body wrestles with his God over the true nature and purpose of art. Is Michelangelo right when he says that "the human body is God's greatest creation, and that to understand it you had to go under the skin"? (And Michelangelo is prepared to dissect corpses to do just that.) Or is Savonarola correct to insist that "the more we paint man rather than God, the more we take away his divinity"?

The reason Alessandra pretends she has cancer is that she longs to kill herself, but fears the consequences of doing so will embarrass her Mother Superior. After all, suicide is a sin. Yet she is certain of her eventual destiny, and it is a destiny she is happy to embrace. "I have memorised Dante's geography of hell well. The wood of the suicides is near to the burning ground of the Sodomites." There, she will be able to converse with other damned souls about "art and literature and the sins for which we are all condemned". There she will spend eternity with the two men she has loved. Who could want more?

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