Perspectives (UK) / Perspective(s) (US)
Florence, 1557: the murdered body of the Mannerist painter Jacopo Pontormo is found in the chancel of the Medici church of San Lorenzo, below his unfinished but partly repainted fresco of the Flood (destroyed in the 18th century).
These frescoes are not without controversy. The Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Eleanora of Toledo, loathes the writhing, naked bodies, which also offend post-Tridentine mores. Predictably, his fellow painter, Giorgio Vasari, dismisses Pontormo’s work as not as good as his own, though equally predictably, it is admired by Pontormo’s leading pupil and chief portraitist of the Medici family, Bronzino, but it is Vasari to whom Grand Duke Cosimo gives the task of solving the crime. Meanwhile, it emerges that Pontormo has also painted a panel of Venus and Cupid, generally regarded as lewd, in which Venus’s features are those of Cosimo’s sixteen-year-old daughter, whom Cosimo intends to dynastically marry to Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara, though she is rapidly falling in love with a young page at her father’s court; a plot is hatched to steal the painting to discredit Cosimo and undermine his ambitions.
Throw into this mix some turbulent nuns (one of whom is a talented painter herself though a disciple of Savonarola’s teachings), a banished member of the Strozzi family in league with Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France, rumblings of Protestant heresy, a monstrously boastful Benvenuto Cellini and a seditious colour-grinder bent on a revival of the Ciompi revolt, and the result is an enthralling Renaissance adventure told entirely through letters. Their writers, of course, do not always tell a consistent story to all their correspondents.
