Meeting Donatello

<p>UPON AN AUTUMN TWILIGHT IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FIORENZA RENZO A CAPTAIN OF the Civic Militia known this evening as Marco attends a <em>riunione riservata</em> 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.<br>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.<br>In <em>Meeting Donatello</em> a prequel to the Renaissance-set novel <em>A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy</em> 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.</p>