Regensburg, 1546: a burgher's daughter with a great voice sings before the Emperor Charles V, and the son she bears him will grow up to be Don John of Austria and win Lepanto — but the novel stays with her, and with what the Empire does to a woman it has finished using. Ebers was an Egyptologist who found the medical papyrus that bears his name; he wrote historical fiction to fund the digging, and the sixteenth century here is documented to the ledger. Fifty-six plates, from Dürer and Lucas Cranach to Munch, trace the woman's portrait through four centuries of northern painting.
