When conservationist Simon Raikes goes to Venice to restore a statue of the Madonna, he is unprepared for the effect this stone virgins strange, seductive beauty and mysterious past will have on his life. As he gradually peels away the layers of dirt from the statue, he becomes increasingly haunted by its potent history of sexual passion, greed, treachery and murder. Mode When conservationist Simon Raikes goes to Venice to restore a statue of the Madonna, he is unprepared for the effect this stone virgins strange, seductive beauty and mysterious past will have on his life. As he gradually peels away the layers of dirt from the statue, he becomes increasingly haunted by its potent history of sexual passion, greed, treachery and murder. Modelled on a beautiful prostitute in fifteenth-century Venice, its sculptor paid with his life when he fell in love with her. Then, in the eighteenth century, a lecherous nobleman consummated an illicit affair beneath the statue, recalled in salacious detail in his memoirs. As Simon becomes caught in the heady sexual spell of the Madonnas story, he is also increasingly attracted to an enigmatic Italian woman, Chiara, the wife of a sculptor, and realizes that the stone virgins violent and erotic past is once again invading the present.