This post was originally published on artnews.com
Giorgio Vasari had the misfortune to be born a second-rate painter in a time and place where when run-of-the-mill talent just wouldn’t cut it. Toss a florin and you’d hit Michelangelo’s David, or Raphael’s Madonna. So rather than beat the old masters, he chronicled them, hooking his reputation to the three hundred names that make up his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Artists (1550–1568). For that book, Vasari has been dubbed the “father of art history,” but don’t let the sobriquet fool you. These are not the dry pronouncements of the academic but the delicious (and dubious) reportage of a writer who knew that frescoes come and go, but gossip lasts forever. Even today, it’s rare to read an account of the Renaissance that does not fall back on what “Vasari says.”
Woe, then, to those artists who found themselves the target of his pen. None had it worse than Jacopo da Pontormo, a painter whose frescos, Vasari charged, violated “any rules at all of either proportion or perspective.” Spend too much time among them and, he wagered, even the art historian himself would “go mad.”
Laurent Binet tests that prediction in his new novel Perspectives, an art-world whodunit set in the agonies and ecstasies of sixteenth-century Florence. His previous bestseller, The Seventh Function of Language (2017) was a picaresque campus novel and Marxist murder mystery starring Umberto Eco as the head of a deconstructionist cult, and there are traces too of Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) in this epistolary thriller that proceeds at the pace that fresco dries—which is to say, quicker than you might want.
We first meet Vasari as an early victim of the gig economy. Between sucking up to Duke Cosimo, orchestrating the year’s Carnival, and supervising unending renovations to the Palazzo Pitti, he barely has enough time to update his Lives for a second edition. When Pontormo is found dead at the foot of his frescoes—a hammer to the head, a burin to the heart—Vasari adds to these to-dos a mission he can’t refuse. Cosimo wants Vasari to solve the murder. The clues are in the paintings.
All paintings have their secrets, but frescoes, if novels are any indicator, seem to hide more than their fair share. In The Painted Room, Danish poet Inger Christensen’s newly reissued novella, bodies pile up in Mantuaas Andrea Mantegna puts the finishing touches on his decorations for the Palazzo Ducale. His patron, Ludovico Gonzaga, is a mercenary parvenu with a penchant for “bizarre ideas and artistic abominations,” according to the catty secretary, Marsilio Andreasi.
This secretary has it in for the painter, and not only because he finds his trompe l’oeil “outlandish.” Years before, the painter stole Marsilio’s childhood sweetheart, leaving him determined to thwart the “upstart” who holds their shared employer in thrall. We get our first glimpses of the artist’s esoteric suite of frescoes, combining scenes of courtly life with fantastic landscapes and ancient myth, in his diary. Things take a turn for the Stalinesque when Ludovico orders the likenesses of those recently deceased to be painted over. The patron unveils it, to great pomp, as the “Painted Room,” but others see it as something more sinister: the “Ghost Room.” What are those grim portraits covering up?
WE WANT OUR PAINTINGS MYSTERIOUS, but we fantasize about puzzling them out. Two decades ago, Dan Brown discovered that those competing desires could make for bestselling material. His swashbuckling symbologist, Robert Langdon, won worldwide acclaim as an Indiana Jones cosplaying in Foucault’s turtleneck, ferreting out the secret of the Mona Lisa’s smile. Harvard credentials, alongside a brawny bravado that could hardly be attributed to hours spent in a library, allows him to crack Da Vinci’s code. His iconographical training has prepared him to see what the authorities cannot: the hidden signs that bind together art and life, past and present.
In actuality, connoisseurship and crime-solving grew up together, in a moment when the task of correcting attributions was as pressing as catching culprits. Sherlock Holmes may be remembered as the 19th century’s greatest private eye, but Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional creation seems to have taken his tack from a real-life sleuth, one mysterious “Ivan Lermolieff.” Giovanni Morelli, as he later revealed himself to be (the nom de plume was, fittingly, an anagram), was a physician who brought the emergent techniques of criminology to bear on a cesspit of misattributed works by all those Renaissance painters that Vasari deemed “most Excellent.” Who was to blame? The biographer himself. Too many identifications rested on the testimony of the Lives, and Vasari was not, in Morelli’s view, a reliable narrator. To find the true hand behind the painting, the connoisseur treated a gilt frame like yellow tape, limiting his evidence to the canvas itself.
What makes a painting like a crime? In art as in life, all the clues, presumably, are there, but it takes a careful eye to make the parts a whole. Morelli prowled the Uffizi’s galleries, scrutinizing the most overlooked features of canvases to “catch” their authors. The dauber was in the details—more specifically, in the ears, hands, and even fingernails that each painter had his own way of rendering. He copied these appendages and lined them up like mugshots. They were fingerprints, of a sort — traces not of a suspect’s hand, but the artist’s. Eccentric as that might sound, Morelli’s method proved hard to shake. As late as 1981, Rosalind Krauss complained of an “art history of the proper name” that ran like a “murder mystery,” reducing interpretation to identification.
PERSPECTIVES GIVES VASARI a swing at redemption. More fanatical even than Morelli’s methods are those of art history’s father—in Binet’s fiction, at least. Scanning Pontormo’s frescos, he detects a subtle seam in the plaster, evidence that someone reworked it after the original had dried. The murderer must be a painter—though that conclusion does nothing to narrow the list. Bronzino, Cellini, Bandinelli: the city swarms with the usual suspects of Art History 101.
As letters fly across Tuscany, we hear from those artists: Bronzino wants to protect Pontormo’s legacy, but also has a motive: designs on his inheritance. Cellini can’t be trusted; he’s a “ruffian with a big mouth who spends most of his time demanding money for work that he never finished” or, in the artist’s own words, a “murderer, thief, infidel, [and] sodomite.” Even old Michelangelo, penning in from Rome, seems to know more than he’s letting on. All these artists were fucking, scheming, and backstabbing in a moment when the puritanical pressures of the counter-reformation made a humanist enclave like Florence a dangerous place for a painter to be. Vasari’s job is to get above it all: to find the point at which “motive, means, and opportunity” align.
To do that, he needs to get some perspective. Or rather, perspectives. At stake in that plural is the crux of these mysteries—and anxieties that have dogged art historians for centuries. Who gets to look, and from what position? Does any one point of view matter more than any other? These are rich questions for Binet and Christensen, who take as their subject artists who challenged the one-point perspective that had become doctrine in fifteenth-century Italy. Both Pontormo and Mantegna made a plaything out of the compositional device that strained mightily to render the world neat, logical, and above all, legible.
In Pontormo’s plans for San Lorenzo, bodies beholden neither to laws of gravity nor anatomy swim like bloated corpses in one great writhing mass; Mantegna stretches the dimensions of the Duke’s Camera picta with dramatic foreshortenings and the illusion, on the ceiling, of a wide-open sky. Frescoes like these toy with the viewer, twisting her gaze up and around and stranding it within compositions that proscribe no stable point of view.
To scale up that vertigo from painting to plot, as Binet and Christensen both do in their own ways, is a clever move. It comes, however, with drawbacks. When you’re not seeing straight, there’s always the danger of getting lost. As Vasari loses faith in perspective, it becomes harder for him to grasp the whole picture—and for the reader to keep control of the story. A stalled plot jerks back to life in a new key, climaxing in a chase scene that eclipses the improbable and lands in slapstick, pitting Brunelleschi’s Duomo against Pontormo’s flood. And though The Painted Room is billed as a thriller, it’s one where intrigue comes second to cryptic excurses on god and geometry. But perhaps that’s fitting for mysteries less concerned with whodunit than with the labyrinthine possibilities of looking. Linger too long, and you might go mad.