Perspective(s) A novel

Binet (HHhH) paints an entertaining and layered portrait of art and politics in Renaissance Florence. The novel is largely composed of letters discovered in a 19th-century Tuscan antique shop by the narrator, a French tourist, who commits to faithfully translating them. From the letters, the reader learns of Giorgio Vasari's investigation on behalf of the Duke of Florence into the murder of Jacopo da Pontormo, a painter who at the time of his death in 1557 was finishing a fresco deemed outrageous by Italy's religious orders. Complicating the murder investigation is the discovery in Pontormo's atelier of a portrait of the Duke's daughter, Maria, as a naked Venus, which could sully the princess's honor and jeopardize her politically calculated upcoming marriage. The letters recount Vasari's interviews with other artists as he tries to get to the bottom of Pontormo's death and determine the origin of the portrait. The cache also contains other correspondences, notably between Catherine of Medici, Queen of France, and the Duke's daughter. Throughout, Binet weighs in on the importance of art via reflections from his characters, an undercooked theme compared to the crackerjack depiction of the period's political intrigue. By the end, though, Binet masterfully weaves together the story's multiple threads. Readers will be captivated. (Apr.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.