One reason the mystery genre has remained popular is its infinite adaptability. Someone can get whacked anywhere and once you’ve got a corpse, the game’s afoot!
French writer Laurent Binet’s “Perspective(s),” newly available in a brisk and breezy English translation by Sam Taylor, is a delightfully inventive whodunit , set in Florence, Italy, smack in the middle of the Renaissance, and populated with the era’s most famous and infamous personalities.
The epistolary novel opens on New Year’s Day 1557, a time when Florence is “a fertile breeding ground for genius but a crucible of boiling passion.” The man in charge of the city, Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, faces threats from the French as well as other regions in Italy. Down in Rome, newly installed Pope Paul IV has declared a holy war on culture, including a ban on nudity in the arts.
Consequently, any number of factions could have been responsible for the murder of Jacopo da Pontormo, one of the greatest painters in a city full of greats, who has been “stabbed with his own chisel, struck by his own hammer ... as if he were betrayed by his most faithful companions.”
Pontormo’s body is found in the Church of San Lorenzo, beneath a fresco he had been working on, a work of art that — depending on your allegiance — is either “a splendour that has not been seen” since the Sistine chapel or an “impious manifestation of the corruption that reigns” in the city.
Cosimo turns to Giorgio Vasari, best known today for giving the Renaissance its name and chronicling the lives of its finest artists. Vasari is the Duke’s go-to guy for everything from political advice to building renovations, and he is tasked with finding the killer quickly, as well as locating and destroying Pontormo’s renowned “Venus and Cupid,” which the master is rumored to have altered, giving the naked goddess the face of Cosimo’s 17-year-old daughter Maria.
If the painting gets out, it would be the 16th-century equivalent of an online sex tape, so of course Queen Catherine of France — Cosimo’s rival — desperately wants it, too. Complicating matters is the fact that Catherine is also Maria’s aunt and the teenager, who’s in love with her father’s page despite being promised to a regional tyrant, is desperate for her aunt’s romantic advice.
Obvious suspects include an activist agitating for apprentice guilds and conspiring nuns who back the Pope’s anti-art crusade, prompting Cosimo to muse, in one of many witty gems in Taylor’s translation: “So, if I understand correctly, Florence, the city that God entrusted to my care, is now infested not only with conspiracies of murderous nuns but with seditious plebs too?”
