It rose four stories high around two inner courtyards, with its own small walled garden and space for my father's business on the ground floor. Our newly completed palazzo was in the east of the city, between the great Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and the church of Sant' Ambrogio. By the time the painter came to live with us in 1492-I remember the date because Lorenzo de' Medici died that spring-the Florentine appetite for flamboyant cloth had made us rich. The smell of cochineal still brings back memories of him coming home from the warehouse, the dust of crushed insects from foreign places embedded deep in his clothes. My father's fortune was rising out of the steam of the dyeing vats in the back streets of Santa Croce then.

'These paintings will bring great glory to our city.' And all those who saw them thought that they would. 'You should remember this moment, Alessandra,' she said. I remember it well, because my mother told me to. I was almost ten years old when Domenico Ghirlandaio completed his frescoes for the Tornabuoni family in the central chapel of Santa Maria Novella. The Angel Gabriel brought God's message to Mary under the arches of a Brunelleschian loggia, the Three Kings led processions through the Tuscan countryside, and Christ's miracles unfolded within our city walls, the sinners and the sick in Florentine dress and the crowds of witnesses dotted with public faces: a host of thick-chinned, big-nosed dignitaries staring down from the frescoes onto their real-life counterparts in the front pews. Our Lord may have lived and died in Galilee, but his life was re-created in the city of Florence. And those who looked saw something else as well.

God was in the very plaster smeared across the walls in readiness for the frescoes: stories of the Gospels made flesh for anyone with eyes to see.

But I was young then and, like so many others, dazzled by the feast. What I hear described even now as a golden age was then simply the fashion of the day. Anyone and everyone who had the money was eager to celebrate God and the Republic by creating opportunities for art. There were times when you couldn't walk the streets for fear of falling into some pit or mire left by constant building. The city was filled with the smell of paint and the scratch of ink on the contracts. It wasn't as if Florence didn't have artists enough of her own. The chapel in our palazzo had recently been completed, and for some months he had been searching for the right pair of hands to execute the altar frescoes. Looking back now, I see it more as an act of pride than kindness that my father brought the young painter back with him from the North that spring.

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant