The perfect beauty

Carla Maria Russo is a writer that we could sum up in a single adjective: passionate . She loves to tell stories and in her books there is never a forced and cerebral attempt to send a message at all costs. Thematic novels are not her thing, even if in her stories the exploration of the characters' psychology is anything but banal, on the contrary. Carla Maria Russo loves above all to tell stories, she loves to give voice to those who can no longer speak because they have been gone for a long time or because they lived in times when certain languages were forced to remain silent... because they were popular languages, perhaps illiterate or even because they were spoken by a woman.

The narrative art of the Milanese writer is found intact in her latest novel, Il velo di Lucrezia (Neri Pozza, 2025, pp. 352, also e-book), set in Tuscany in the second half of the fifteenth century.

The protagonist is one of the great masters of fifteenth-century painting, Filippo Lippi , a friar, an artist, a man too often incapable of coming to terms with himself, his talent and the world around him.

Filippo was born to a butcher, but still a child he found himself an orphan and after a few years his relatives saw the only chance of survival in "donating" him to a monastery. Before the cloister, however, Filippo grew up free to experiment with life and talent.

Reckless, an exuberant womanizer, unfortunately very poor, to escape poverty he had to take vows, meeting his destiny right in the monastery: an enlightened abbot who sent him to the apprenticeship of a famous painter . In the monastery, also frequented by great artists, first and foremost Masaccio, he also discovers that the talent he has always had in his hands, that of drawing, is not the work of the devil, but a divine gift, which however he struggles to make fruitful. Until he meets the beauty that can change your life, that saving beauty that only a woman can offer to a man.

This is how Carla Maria Russo narrates this shocking encounter for Lippi: «He couldn't say how long he lingers in contemplation of that face. He couldn't say because he is already completely bewitched by what he sees and sucked into the process of creation. Perfect beauty. There it is, before his eyes. He has chased it in vain for years and he has found it suddenly, when he had lost hope. In the place where he would never have imagined meeting it».

This perfect beauty has the face of Madonna di Lucrezia. Daughter of a dyer, Lucrezia is a girl of the people who hides a passionate heart, a rebellious desire to exist, to be seen, to light up the quiet around her , a devouring ambition that the walls of the convent where she lives cannot contain. The love between the young woman and the artist, forbidden in Heaven and on Earth, strikes the lives of both and is eternalized in a work that still arouses wonder today: The Madonna with Child and Angels, preserved in the Uffizi. A work that Lippi donated in 1464 to his protector, Cosimo de' Medici.

Let's try to imagine the scene, before reliving it almost live in the pages of Carla Maria Russo's book. The canvas is wrapped in a white cloth held by a string, the hand holding it is unsteady with emotion. The moment that Filippo Lippi has waited and feared has now arrived: Cosimo de' Medici is about to see the only truly perfect work that he has managed to create during his long career, the only one he would never want to part with. Preserved in that painting are not only the dedication, the hands hard from toil, the incessant struggle against imperfection. There is the love for Lucrezia, a scandalous love for everyone, for him very pure. There is the pact between them, the mutual gift: beauty in exchange for the freedom to exist, to be noticed, to not be simply a dyer's daughter, but a passionate, loved, desired woman. In that painting there is that beauty and that freedom that only works of art can gather for eternity in a single place, in a single moment, in a single glance. Then the cloth is removed and Cosimo, the lord of Florence, can only cry with emotion.