Perspectives begins, naturally, with a murder. Jacopo da Pontormo, the painter often credited with shifting the course of Florentine Renaissance art, has been stabbed through the heart with a chisel ‘at the foot of his famous frescoes’ in San Lorenzo (since tragically lost to a fire in the eighteenth century, though still venerated by art historians as near-equals to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel). According to Giorgio Vasari’s influential account of the period, The Lives of the Artists (1550), Pontormo had in fact died of ‘the dropsy’. But Laurent Binet has made a career from playing fast and loose with historical facts. Here, Vasari is entrusted by Cosimo de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence, to solve the crime, and a complex, fast-paced whodunnit ensues through the streets and studios of Renaissance Florence.
There is no shortage of suspects, with each perspective rendered in the novel’s epistolary form and its twenty constituent correspondents. We hear from nuns who despise Pontormo’s ‘obscene’ paintings; his abused colour grinder, Naldini, who clandestinely unionises a revolutionary guild of craftsmen and speaks of ‘spectres’ haunting Italy; and, thanks to a skilfully – but incongruously – repainted section of Pontormo’s fresco, every exponent of the emerging artistic style later known as Mannerism comes under suspicion.
The plot thickens when a ‘lascivious’ painting is discovered in Pontormo’s studio. In Binet’s reimagining of his real-life Venus and Cupid, the goddess bears an unmistakeable resemblance to Cosimo de Medici’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Maria. The scandalous painting becomes a pawn amidst the wider machinations of Renaissance Europe, as Florentine Republicans and the Kingdom of France conspire to bring down Cosimo de Medici’s Habsburg-aligned autocratic dynasty. Maria’s dignity, her marriage prospects, and the political ambitions of her father thus converge on Pontormo’s ‘Roman harlot’.
It says much for Binet’s skill that he can weave a thorny murder mystery into such a notoriously convoluted historical moment without letting either element overwhelm the other. Allusions to Les Liaisons dangereuses and liturgical laws sit comfortably in a plot that also features a scene in which Vasari, cornered by an assailant and armed with a crossbow, experiences a lifesaving eureka moment: ‘the laws of perspective taking shape before me, as clearly as if I had traced them myself with a ruler,’ he fires at the vanishing point – and hits his attacker between the eyes.
But Binet is nothing if not erudite and knowing. His previous novels – the WWII thriller HHhH and The Seventh Function of Language, which transforms the death of Roland Barthes into a madcap murder mystery set in the heady world of 1980s French theory – marked him out as a master of historical metafiction, where high-stakes drama meets self-reflexive play. What Perspectives ultimately fails to do is bring this period to life. Epistolary novels are, by their nature, narrated at a remove from the events themselves; Perspectives even provides a frame narrative, with the correspondences found by a nineteenth-century speaker in a Tuscan antique shop. A polyphony of perspectives provides an illusion of depth, but here it falls flat. Binet’s decision to contemporise Renaissance parlance is understandable, but half-hearted, leaving characters lurching between historical anachronisms and Shakespearean flair (at least, in Sam Taylor’s translation). Correspondents speak in a range of registers – from Cellini’s laughably hyperbolic revisionisms to Maria’s youthful candour – but they remain oddly static, frozen, emotionally removed from the events. This, in turn, stultifies the novel’s action into a mosaic of highly subjective soundbites. All suspense and mystery are lost amidst the constantly changing correspondences, until it begins to feel rather shaggy dog. Entertaining though the novel’s premise is, its execution lacks heart. And, failing to articulate a deeper message, Perspectives ultimately feels brittle.
Of course, these are the very criticisms levelled against Mannerism: the subject and, one might say, style of Perspectives. Whereas High Renaissance art was seen to embody humanism, idealism, and rationalism, Mannerism was, well, mannered. In the annals of history, it has been variously dismissed as affectless, artificial, convoluted, even pretentious. The content of Perspectives rightly and unequivocally repudiates this historical misnomer, providing a timeless and unironic celebration of art’s value, be that Mannerism or Michelangelo. For the characters in Binet’s novel, and especially for Pontormo, art is a matter of life and death. It is also the only thing that escapes the narrator’s otherwise pervasive irony. That the novel begins with the epigraph ‘These are hard times for art’ – a line from a letter between Michelangelo and his father – feels pointed, even programmatic. The novel’s highlights all occur when Binet’s obvious passion for Renaissance art is given free reign, and there are some poetically inspired moments of ekphrasis, where, in particular, Pontormo’s frescoes are momentarily saved from the ashes of history.
One painter in the novel contends that Mannerism sought not to imitate nature but to improve on it – ‘by rendering it more richly and with more variety.’ Binet surely shares this ambition in his epistolary Renaissance romp. Yet by constantly drawing attention to the artifice of his own prose, he draws attention not to art, but to the artist – to Binet himself. The novel’s self-conscious style strains against its sincere message, creating a dissonance between what it wants to say and how it says it.
Reviewed by Tom Taylor
PERSPECTIVES
Written by Laurent Binet
Translated from French by Sam Taylor
Published by Harvill Secker (2025)
June 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Tom Taylor is a literary scout and writer based in London.
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