Pontormo, Vasari and Michelangelo take leading roles in this 16th-century whodunnit

"The monumental frescoes in the choir of San Lorenzo in Florence, commissioned in 1546 by Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Florence, were supposed to be the painter Jacopo da Pontormo's artistic legacy. The most provocative of Italian mannerists, Pontormo (1494-1557) spent a decade perfecting them, in a race against his own declining health. Today only preliminary sketches remain: recreations of scenes from the Book of Genesis and the Last Judgment, showing piles of writhing, cascading bodies, with wide-open eyes and mouths seemingly cut into their mask-like faces."

"Pontormo's younger rival Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), now remembered for his artist biographies rather than his art, hated Pontormo's work. There was, he complained, no "order of composition" here, no attention paid to "any rule, proportion or law of perspective"."

"In Perspectives, Laurent Binet's intricately woven art-historical whodunnit, Pontormo's frescoes are still intact. But their creator is not. As the novel begins, we learn from a letter sent by Vasari to Michelangelo Buonarroti that the artist's dead body has been found, with a chisel rammed through his heart, directly beneath the wall with his fresco of the Deluge. The discovery that this exact portion was recently redone, in a style different from that of Pontormo, adds to the mystery. And then there are the sightings of a painting by Pontormo of a naked Venus with, scandalously, the face of Maria de' Medici, the duke's daughter."

Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned monumental frescoes for the choir of San Lorenzo in 1546 as Pontormo's intended artistic legacy. Pontormo worked for a decade while his health declined, and only preliminary sketches of Genesis and Last Judgment scenes survive today. Those sketches show writhing, cascading bodies with wide-open eyes and mask-like faces. Giorgio Vasari vehemently disliked Pontormo's style, criticizing its lack of compositional order, proportion and perspective. A dead body with a chisel through the heart was found beneath the Deluge fresco; a portion of the wall had been recently repainted in a different style. Sightings of a Venus painted with Maria de' Medici's face provoked scandal, and Cosimo turns to Vasari to investigate.

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