Sister Act

Two sisters vie for immortality in the paintings of a promising artist named Leonardo da Vinci.

LEONARDO'S SWANS

A Novel

By Karen Essex

Doubleday. 344 pp. $21.95

Like pretty much everything else in the universe, historical fiction can be divided into two categories. On the one hand are books, like Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle," that use real historical events and people as a springboard for the author's imagined events and people. On the other hand are novels, like William Safire's Scandalmonger , that limit their scope to characters and events from the archives. I strongly favor books of the first kind and shy away from the second. History -- fortunately -- tends to make for great history. Reality, however, does not necessarily make for great fiction.

Karen Essex's Leonardo's Swans fits firmly in the second category of rigidly historical fiction, and while it is in many ways accomplished, it also suffers from almost unavoidable drawbacks. The novel centers on two sisters in late 15th-century Italy: Isabella and Beatrice d'Este of Ferrara. As the book opens, the sisters prepare for marriage: the beautiful Isabella to the handsome Francesco Gonzaga, and the tomboyish Beatrice to the rakish and scheming Ludovico Sforza, regent to the duke of Milan. Isabella is very happy with this arrangement. Francesco may not be the most influential man in Italy, but he's a looker and an important soldier. Ludovico, however, is reputed (the girls have never seen him) to be ancient (nearly 40), dissolute and morally repulsive.

Isabella, however, is in for a surprise. While she finds passion in her marriage to Francesco, she is obsessively attracted to Ludovico, who is all the bad things said about him. Keeping his nephew, the true duke of Milan, besotted with drink and boy-buggery, he schemes to hold on to power and envisions Milan as a great artistic capital. Central to Isabella's interest in Ludovico is his court artist, Leonardo da Vinci, whose unusual and wide-ranging talent Isabella recognizes. His art, she decides, will be celebrated forever, and she wants her beauty immortalized in one of his works, a desire that leads to sisterly complication, as does Isabella's seduction of her sister's husband.

This rivalry between the sisters stands at the heart of the novel's first and most interesting section. Isabella's desire to position herself as a major figure in Italian culture and in her brother-in-law's bedroom generates some exciting scenes. Similarly, Beatrice's efforts to come to terms with her husband's daring and conniving nature make for engaging reading. Yet all too soon the sisters retreat to significantly less dramatic roles. Beatrice and her husband find love, with Ludovico's mistress amicably sidelined. Isabella ends her affair with Ludovico, but not her efforts to model for his great artist.

Leonardo's character is one of the great surprises of this book, and in portraying him the author never seems to engage in post-Dan Brown opportunism. The reader may be constantly reminded of Leonardo's genius, but he is an understated figure, a brilliant but disorganized mind whose twitchy intelligence makes him interested in starting countless projects but able to finish few. One of the pleasures of reading this book is learning the secret history behind paintings like "The Last Supper" and "The Virgin of the Rocks."

But Essex's adherence to the archival record hinders the book in two principal ways. She sticks closely to known events but seems unwilling to engage with the issue of historical subjectivity. Never do we feel as if we are inside the heads of pre-Enlightenment people. These are not alien women from another time; they are modern women in another time. Similarly, as the novel becomes more focused on the political machinations of the era, it disconnects itself from the experiences of the two protagonists. The historical Isabella and Beatrice may have been proximate to men who shaped some of the major events of Renaissance Italy, but they were rarely witness to them. Despite some excellent writing and archival work, the result feels sometimes like a history play in which characters come on stage to announce births, deaths and the outcomes of far-away battles. Indeed, as Leonardo's Swans marches along, driven by facts rather than the necessities of storytelling, the novel often takes on a strangely resigned tone, as if it's just running out the clock. ·

David Liss is the author of "A Conspiracy of Paper," "A Spectacle of Corruption" and, most recently, "The Ethical Assassin."