Jo Ford

Colophon: a Novel of Renaissance Florence Jo Ford

This novel of Renaissance Italy weaves together fiction and history to illuminate the decades before and after 1492 in Florence and Venice. When the Venetian Jacopo Rossi is dispatched to Florence on an espionage mission, he encounters of the brilliant circle of Humanists surrounding Lorenzo di Medici, not only Pico della Mirandola, artist Sandro Botticelli, and the charismatic priest Girolamo Savonarola, but also the beautiful daughter of a goldsmith powerful in the Florentine guilds. Through the adventures of this young man, a book lover caught up in the wildfire revolution of printing, the reader is able to walk the streets of the two cities as they were then. As he falls in love, rides in the palio against the arrogant Piero di Medici and narrowly escapes the dungeon, we experience the excitement of Renaissance life, bursting with creativity and danger in the dramatic changes preceding the Jubilee year of 1500. Even as Savonarola fanatically sets torch to the Bonfire of the Vanities, the Venetian Aldus Manutius pulls a handpress to stamp newly printed classics with his colophon, the anchor and the dolphin. In the novel, the roots of Renaissance greatness in the cities of Florence and Venice are found in the everyday life of the common people as well as that of the celebrated artists and philosophers.