Artful dodgers

Florence, January 1, 1557. The painter Jacopo da Pontormo is found dead. Murder is suspected: he has been struck with a blunt instrument and stabbed through the heart with scissors. His body is discovered in front of his frescoes at the church of San Lorenzo. He had laboured over them for a decade and they were nearing completion. Was this an opportunistic robbery or a crime of passion? Perhaps an overzealous art critic? Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) treads familiar ground for a historical thriller, but the art of painting is what is really at the centre of the enigmas posed by his novel. Part of Pontormo’s work appears to have been unconvincingly repainted. Was this the handiwork of the culprit? What is more, investigators searching his residence find an obscene painting, a version of the painter’s “Venus and Cupid” (c.1533), based on a cartoon by Michelangelo, with Venus’s face replaced by that of the Duke of Florence’s oldest daughter, the seventeen-year-old Maria de’ Medici.

In real life Pontormo’s frescoes have been lost to history (though they are remembered by art historians as being almost as significant as Michelangelo’s at the Sistine Chapel). Binet’s characters, meanwhile, will be familiar to anyone with an interest in sixteenth-century Italy: as well as Maria, his cast of historical figures includes her father (Cosimo de’ Medici), her estranged aunt and Queen of France (Catherine de’ Medici) and the revered Michelangelo himself. The duke has instructed another painter, Giorgio Vasari, known for his important book Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (1550; The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), to lead the investigation. He is assisted by his friend Vincenzo Borghini, and the pair’s letters – with their updates and speculations – are our main source of information about the case.

Perspective(s) is an epistolary novel, but, rather than a subtle work of manners, as we might expect from the period and genre, it is essentially a tight, fast-paced, well-managed whodunnit. The story gets very complex very quickly, with subplots blossoming: Pontormo’s painting of Maria becomes the focus of machinations from France to undermine the Duke; Maria plans to flee to Paris to escape a forced marriage; and we meet two art-loving nuns, Sister Plautilla Nelli and Sister Catherine de Ricci, who are offended by the realistic nudes of Pontormo’s frescoes.

The swiftness of epistolary exchange largely suits the investigative mood, propelling the narrative yet keeping a reader at an intriguing distance from the action. As the title suggests, Perspective(s) is concerned with different points of view, complementary and conflicting, with Vasari charged with reconciling them. Postmodern playfulness with an underlying message is what we have come to expect from Binet, who has emerged over the past decade as a significant voice in French writing. His HHhH (TLS, October 5, 2012), which concerned the Nazi security chief Reinhard Heydrich, is also a meta-novel about researching and writing history; La Septième Fonction du langage (2017) is an entertainingly farcical send-up of French theoretical pretentiousness, anchored in an investigation into the death of Roland Barthes; and Civilizations (2021) is a thoughtful counter-history of globalization, speculating on what would have happened if the Incas had “discovered” Europe.

In this new novel, the letters do offer a range of different “perspectives” on the case, along with an entertaining (if rather silly) action sequence in which Vasari avoids a stabbing thanks to his own understanding of Alberti’s rules of perspective in painting. One pleasingly lyrical letter from Michelangelo tells us that when he and his peers came to understand perspective, “this was how painters could believe themselves the equal of God: now we could also create reality[my translation]”. But moments such as these never quite coalesce. At one point, when we learn that the realistic detail of Pontormo’s nudes was either adored or abhorred by his public, it seems that we are being nudged to think about today’s so-called culture wars; and the affair of the doctored “Venus and Cupid” seems to gesture vaguely towards today’s online shaming culture. But none of these strands ever really takes root. Ultimately it is hard to see what powers Perspective(s) beyond the murder-mystery plot.

Russell Williams is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris, and consultant French Editor of the TLS

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