Author Description

This is Tiffany Thayer's massive, epic telling of the story behind the painting of Mona Lisa...a book so large, and a story so vast, that it took sixteen years to write, 1,226 pages to tell, and had to be divided into three volumes to publish. Now it's finally back in print after over 65 years lost in obscurity. The sprawling, adventurous novel is presented as a "long-lost" manuscript by poet Francois Villon that dramatizes the sex, decadence, intrigue and violence of Queen Joan II's scandalous rule of Renaissance Italy as she pursued her naked desires while also thwarting the Prince of Taranto's nefarious plots to steal her throne. Mona Lisa herself never appears in Mona Lisa: The Prince of Taranto, which was a prequel to her story, and was intended to be the first of a dozen equally massive novels in the saga, which were never published. The commercial failure of the first book in 1956, and Thayer's death in 1959, doomed the other novels, assuming that any were actually completed, which seems likely, given the author's afterword at the end of volume three, teasing that next book was only months away from publication. But even on its own, this huge novel is a masterpiece of historical fiction, a rousing read that's timeless. "Thayer knows his Renaissance history. Being an irrepressible wag, however, he cannot write without burlesquing his subject. It's impossible to take this thing seriously, since the author refuses to. Yet, if it is merely a literary romp, it is surely the longest in the history of letters. Actually, Mona Lisa is fun. Lots of blood is sloshed about and boudoirs are as busy as Macy's basement on a Saturday morning." Minneapolis Star-Tribune "A juicy, medieval morass. Mr. Thayer achieves a kind of narcotic euphoria for the reader." Saturday Evening Post "Thayer conceived the idea about writing a novel about Mona Lisa, but somewhere along the line the project was infected with verbal elephanti