"Blood and Beauty - The Borgias," by Sarah Dunant - NYTimes.com On June 29 in the jubilee year of 1500, lightning made a direct hit on Vatican City, striking the roof directly above the corrupt, scheming Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI - better known in our time as Rodrigo Borgia - while he sat on his majestic throne. The blast sent a stone fireplace on a higher floor crashing through the ceiling, leaving His Holiness "engulfed by an avalanche of wood and plaster." In her evocation of this scene in "Blood and Beauty," her novel about the notorious Borgias, Sarah Dunant sends papal guards rushing to save their lord, "throwing themselves onto the pile, tearing at the rubble with their bare hands." Hulton Archive/Getty Images "A carnal man and very loving of his flesh and blood": Pope Alexander VI, circa 1485. The Borgias By Sarah Dunant Random House. $27. Before reading into this thunderclap a demonstration of divine judgment against Borgia and his power-hungry, lascivious sons - who conspired through murder, war and strategic marriages to dominate Italy at the height of the Renaissance - consider two facts. First: the Borgia pope survived. And second: lightning also made a direct hit this year on the dome of St. Peter's, on Feb. 11, the same day Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation. Was it the wrath of God or a twist of fate - ordered, as Rodrigo suspects, by "that other deity, Fortuna"? Sometimes a lightning bolt is just a lightning bolt. In the five centuries since Rodrigo Borgia's death in 1503, his family name has become synonymous with poison, incest and violent intrigue, and has inspired a host of biographies, paintings, operas, novels, movies and television dramas - the latest of which, Showtime's three-season series, has just concluded. The Borgias were definitely bad, but were they as bad as all that? Dunant, the author of several previous best-selling works of fiction set in the Italian Renaissance, doesn't think so. Did Rodrigo Borgia sleep with his daughter, Lucrezia, as her first husband charged? "Not true," the author protests in a video on her Web site. Did Lucrezia have a steamy affair with her syphilitic brother, Cesare? "Not true," Dunant scoffs. Was Lucrezia a serial poisoner? Again: "Not true." Were the Borgias "tremendous murderers and ruthless merchants?" Well, you've got her there. In "Blood and Beauty," Dunant follows the path set by Hilary Mantel with "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies." Just as Mantel humanized and, to an extent, rehabilitated the brilliant, villainous Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, Dunant transforms the blackhearted Borgias and the conniving courtiers and cardinals of Renaissance Europe into fully rounded characters, brimming with life and lust. Here they provoke, if not exactly empathy, then a new understanding, grounded in the context of their brutal times. Dunant begins her story on a sultry August day in 1492. Pope Innocent VIII has just died, and a crowd of decayed, malodorous cardinals preen and scheme in the Sistine Chapel, striking poses against biblical frescoes as they wait to learn who will win the keys to the kingdom. The air, Dunant writes, "is sour with the sweat of old flesh. Rome in August is a city of swelter and death. It is the cunning Rodrigo Borgia, Cardinal of Valencia, a "paunchy 61-year-old" and vice chancellor to five previous popes, who will receive the crown. At his nearby palazzo, three of his illegitimate children, Juan, Lucrezia and Jofré, and their guardian, Borgia's cousin Adriana, receive the good news and prepare to shower the proud Papa with "twittering admiration." He "sucks in their vigor like great lungfuls of fresh air," Dunant writes, "so that he becomes stronger and more potent in their presence." Pope Alexander VI will receive a still heartier embrace from his teenage mistress, Giulia Farnese, "milk-skinned, golden-haired and young enough to be his granddaughter," who lives with the family, a playmate to Lucrezia and, in a different sense, to her father - though Giulia is married, for propriety's sake, to Adriana's son, Orsino. "To be the mistress of a pope is to be in the eye of all the world," Adriana gushes. What about Orsino? Giulia ingenuously asks. "Your husband is as much a Borgia as he is an Orsini, and he will be proud for the honor of his family," the pragmatic mother-in-law replies. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.