Review: Historical mystery plays with Renaissance art and artists

This book bears some similarities to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

- Alyssa Woo

PERSPECTIVES By Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor Fiction/Harvill Secker/Paperback/ 264 pages/$32.19 ★★★★★

It starts with a murder, famous Italian artists are involved, and the narrative takes artistic liberties with real historical figures.

Perspectives, first published in French in 2023, is decidedly unserious, breezy and funny. Critics of French author Laurent Binet have taken issue with this book for being less cerebral than his previous works HHhH and Civilisations.

Prominent Italian artist Jacopo da Pontormo in 16th-century Florence, Italy, is found dead next to his fresco masterpiece, said to rival Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel upon its completion.

That Pontormo's fresco features many nude bodies in its depiction of The Flood — at a time when the Church and the order of nuns considered it improper and even sacrilegious — is not the only scandal.

Found among his possessions at home is a painting of a naked Venus, sprawled in a crude pose and with the face of Maria de' Medici, the daughter of his employer Cosimo de' Medici — the ruthless and scheming Duke of Florence who harbored ambitions to rule the whole of Tuscany.