A monk and a novitiate--in love. It was scandalous, romantic, dangerous, and desperate. This story, reminiscent of a Shakespearean tragedy-romance, is based on fact, full of breathtaking description and heart wrenching sorrow. The Miracles of Prato is a study of parallels: parallels between love and hate, despair and ecstasy, truth and appearances, life inside and outside the church, the differences between men and women, the physical and the divine, and even the parallel talents of the authors themselves.
With an historian's eye for factual detail, Laura Morowitz situates this true story of two forbidden lovers within the historical details of 15th century Italy, while Laurie Lico Albanese uses her gift for story-telling to weave a cohesive story that captures the beauty, hope and desperation of illicit love.
Lucrezia Buti finds her life disrupted and her plans for a husband and family destroyed by the death of her father. When her father's silk-making business is taken to settle his debts, the only alternative is for Lucrezia and her sister Spinetta to seek shelter with the sisters of Santa Margherita. As a novitiate, Lucretzia meets and falls in love with Fra Filippo Lippi, the convent's chaplain and an acclaimed artist. A monk driven to the cloth for similar reasons as Lucretzia, Lippi spends his days trying to reconcile the parallels between the divine and the physical that he sees around him.
Taking solace in her work tending herbs in the convent's garden, Lucrezia quickly recognizes the parallels between her knowledge of mixing dyes for her father's silk's and mixing paints for Lippi's legendary paintings. When she voices her concern to the chaplain that she is too attached to beautiful things, Lippi responds by pointing out that physical beauty on earth is merely a reflection, a parallel of the divine beauty in heaven, and that appreciation of beauty is a kind of worship. For Lippi, "painting is prayer," and he prays by painting Lucrezia as his Madonna, the face of his Mother of God.
As their mutual desire for beauty--Lippi's for Lucrezia, and Lucrezia's for Lippi's paintings--draws them together, the ugliness of their impossible situation and gossiping tongues threatens their safety and happiness as their infant son is taken from them in an act of retribution. The Miracles of Prato ends before the factual story does, leaving the reader curious to know more about this unlikely coupling, and reluctant to put down this elegant and literary work of historical fiction.