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My guest today is Kerry Chaput, author of The Secret Courtesan, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fkX-QqvmnQg

• Premise for the novel: how a marble Venetian sculpture, surfacing after 400 years and credited to a male artist, sends Mia, a modern-day arts authenticator looking for the woman she is sure had carved it.
• Kerry found documented women painters of the Renaissance and Baroque, but no large-scale women sculptors, and decided that gap in the record was the story worth telling.
• Artemisia's dusty painting: the real-life rediscovery of an Artemisia Gentileschi painting in a Hampton Court storage room, proof that misattributed women's art isn't just a plot device.
• Veronica Franco and the real courtesans: how the film Dangerous Beauty and its real-life subject, Renaissance Venice's premier courtesan, inspired the character of Sofia, and why courtesans had more freedom, education, and political access than "respectable" women of the era.
• Pitched as The Da Vinci Code with a feminist twist: the puzzles and cliffhangers built into Mia's modern timeline, and why Kerry had to finish writing Sofia's 1609 story before she could solve Mia's.
• Zero outline, one nice bow: Kerry's pantser process from first page to last, alternating between timelines and following "wormholes" even when they lead nowhere.
• The hardest research wasn't the history: why untangling art authentication, auction houses, and international law was tougher than 17th-century Venice, and how friends in the art world helped her build a plausible Sotheby's-style plot.
• A law against something means someone was doing it: the logic behind laws barring women from studying art and obtaining materials, and what that says about who was quietly doing both anyway.
• Writing women who already have a voice: why Kerry skipped the "she finds her voice" arc for Sofia, and how a story about a woman claiming power she already has changes the whole shape of the narrative.
• Reading from The Secret Courtesan: a 2 a.m. library scene between Mia and fellow historian Noah as her theory about the sculptor's true identity finally comes out.
• What's next: Kerry's ongoing Substack, Badass Women in History, and her continued fascination with the women the historical record left out.

Read more from Kerry Chaput on her Substack, Badass Women in History: https://kerrychaput.substack.com/

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Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...