2025-02-15
An epistolary novel of art, intrigue, and homicide in Renaissance Italy.
French novelist Binet opens with a familiar trope, declaring that he’s stumbled upon a cache of letters from 1557 and 1558 that “form a tale so compelling that [he] stayed up all night devouring them.” The first letter, from teenage Maria de’ Medici to her aunt, the queen of France, offhandedly announces a mystery: The painter Jacopo da Pontormo is dead, according to her by his own hand. “What a drag!,” she exclaims in an anachronistic turn of phrase when moving on to her real subject, her father’s plan to marry her off. The courtier Giorgio Vasari, writing to Michelangelo at his Roman place of exile, has different news: Pontormo’s body was discovered “with a chisel embedded in his heart,” and with his head bashed in as well. Vasari ventures a theory, Michelangelo counters with another, and other interlocutors, such as Agnolo Bronzino and Cosimo I, the duke of Florence, have their own ideas: Pontormo was killed by an offended beau because he superimposed Maria’s face on a nude Venus; he was done in by zealous nuns who were followers of Savonarola and who, when interrogated, called all painters “degenerate sodomites with bestial morals”; one of Pontormo’s apprentices has killed his notoriously irascible master; and so forth. Vasari, a slippery fellow, turns out to have cat burglar skills as well as a nose for police work, announcing in the language of a modern procedural his conclusion that one suspect “brought together the three elements necessary for a guilty verdict: motive, means, and opportunity.” It’s noName of the Rose, but Binet’s yarn has plenty of entertaining moments as the would-be detectives rule out suspects and hone in on their quarry.
With a plot as thick as gesso, Binet’s latest takes inventive twists to arrive at a satisfying conclusion.
