title: The Serpent and the Flame
author: Ceriano, Valerie
description: In Valerie Ceriano's panoramic novel of the Eighteenth Century, a sculptor pursues his destiny across a teeming landscape of artisans and princes vying for dominion in the resplendent courts of an empire.
  
  Power is the fortress and Beauty its arsenal as Marcantonio Rossi wrestles his demons and seizes an imperial city as reigning god of its peerless yet passing Rococo age. Treasure-laden palaces surge from the hand of Rossi and other artists who ply a course for survival through treacherous artistic and political currents, beaconed only by the era's voluptuous autocrats.
  
  The Serpent and The Flame opens amid the ruin of post-World War II Germany before turning to the verge of the eighteenth century's malarial Italian rice fields, where Rossi's extraordinary life begins. Ultimately, the tumult of nearly three centuries culminates in the renaissance of Würzburg's superb Residence, as Hilda Kress and other Trümmerfrauen -- “rubble women” -- orchestrate their city's phoenix-like resurgence.
  
  The Serpent and The Flame is at heart the story of “The Line of Beauty”, with its “…serpent-like and flaming form” quickening the art and ornament of the eighteenth-century's High Rococo, propelling its rarefied filaments through the great Residence as it presages the fate of artists and princes alike.