

A few weeks before traveling to Venice and Florence I read Laurent Binet’s latest novel Perspective(s). While traveling I read Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which I had saved for the occasion. Both novels are set in 16th-century Florence and offer a vivid portrait of the city and the era.
Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) centers around the murder of the painter Jacopo da Pontormo, a historical figure whose work can still be seen in Florence. His body is found in a church in Florence in front of the frescoes that he had been working on for more than a decade. But who would commit such a crime and why? The inquiry into his death is given a surprising twist when inside the painter’s residence, the investigators discover an obscene painting, a version of “Venus and Cupid”, but with Venus’s face replaced by that of the seventeen-year-old Maria de’ Medici, the oldest daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence. Shortly after the painting mysteriously vanishes. Cosimo de’ Medici asks Giorgio Vasari, the painter and architect best known for his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), to take over the investigation, to solve the crime and retrieve the painting.
Perspective(s) is a joy to read. It is a fast-paced historical thriller with a large cast of historical characters and multiple sub-plots. It is written in the form of letters exchanged between the various protagonists. This, of course, raises the question how these letters, from Vasari to Michelangelo and from Maria de’ Medici to her aunt Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France, ended up in one place, as the presumed editor of the corpus also acknowledges in the introduction. To be entirely consistent the various letters would also have had to be written in multiple voices and not just one voice. But it’s a literary device which allows Binet to tell the story from different perspectives and to show that each character can only ever know part of the truth. Only we, the readers, get to know the full truth.
In The Marriage Portrait Maggie O’Farrell recounts the life of Lucrezia, the third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, who was married to Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, following the death of her older sister Maria. A year into the marriage, aged just 16, she died. It was rumored that she had been murdered. Little is known about her life, giving O’Farrell ample opportunities to fill in the details and to give a voice to a marginal and largely forgotten historical figure.
Reading The Marriage Portrait is thus a bit like watching Titanic, or reading HHhH by Laurent Binet for that matter, because the end is already known. But Maggie O’Farrell is a highly imaginative writer, as she showed in her wonderful previous novel Hamnet.
The novel opens with Lucrezia realizing that her husband, Alfonso d’Este, has abducted her to a remote castle with the intention to kill her. Alternating chapters recount the next 24 hours and the years, from her childhood onwards, leading up to her marriage and her impending murder. O’Farrell has turned Lucrezia into a clever girl, “quite the scholar” one of Alfonso’s sisters remarks at some point, who speaks multiple languages and has a remarkable talent for drawing and painting. Once, when the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari visits her father, he is so impressed by one of her paintings that he asks if he can have it.
Both Perspective(s) and The Marriage Portrait make for a perfect travel companion on a trip to Florence. It was fun to stroll along the city’s cobbled alleyways, to visit the Palazzo Vecchio, the Uffizi Galleries and the city’s churches with both stories in the back of my mind.
Is it just me or does Bronzino’s portrait of Maria de’ Medici (1550-51) in the Uffizi Galleries resemble one of the half-naked women in his "Descent of Christ Into Limbo" (1552) in the Basilica di Santa Croce?

