As dawn breaks over the city of Florence on New Year’s Day 1557, Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him are the frescoes he labored over for more than a decade—masterpieces all, rivaling the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When guards search his quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence’s oldest daughter. The city erupts in chaos. Who could have committed these crimes: murder and lèse-majesté? Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation.
A brisk and breezy English translation ... Binet does an excellent job of cycling through the various letter-writers without ever allowing the reader to get lost. But his most brilliant feat is incorporating historical facts and attributes into the framework of his mystery.
Has all the elements of a classic mystery, put together by a knowing hand that is at once respectful of the genre and dexterous enough to be playful ... We need devices like the whodunnit to provide a vanishing point on which to centre the canvas, so that the messy beauty of history can play on the peripheral vision.
