The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness.
What then to make of the cortigiana onesta --the Honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life? Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was such a woman, a Writer and Citizen of Venice, whose published poems and familiar letters offer rich testimony to the complexity of the ho.
The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness