Renaissance Deepfake

During​ his martyrdom in 258 AD, St Lawrence, as he was being grilled alive by the Roman authorities, is said to have asked his persecutors to turn him over, since ‘I’m done on this side.’ He is consequently the patron saint not only of cooks but also of comedians – and a presiding spirit over his namesake Laurent Binet’s seriously silly and immensely enjoyable new novel, which centres on a murder committed in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence on the night of 31 December 1556.

The victim is the Mannerist painter Jacopo da Pontormo, who according to Vasari in The Lives of the Artists wasn’t murdered at all but died of oedema or ‘the dropsy’ (idropisia). In Binet’s version, however, Vasari is entrusted by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici with solving the crime, and what he discovers in the course of his inquiries gives him every reason to cover up the truth, including the violent circumstances of Pontormo’s demise. He has been hit on the head with a hammer and stabbed in the heart with a chisel ‘at the foot of his famous frescoes’. An erudite murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where Eco’s plot turns on a secret copy of a lost book, Binet’s this time revolves around a lost cycle of paintings. Another obvious precursor is Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, in which a miniaturist at the Ottoman court of Murad III is murdered. Binet acknowledges the connection by taking the first of his epigraphs from Pamuk’s novel: ‘Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colours.’ The second is from a letter Michelangelo wrote to his father in October 1509: ‘These are hard times for art.’

Pontormo’s frescoes in San Lorenzo, finished after his death by Agnolo Bronzino, were destroyed in the 18th century. Vasari gives a long, detailed but ultimately dismissive description of them in the Lives. Commissioned by Cosimo, Pontormo began them in 1546. He worked in secret, ‘having closed off the chapel with walls, partitions and blinds, and having given himself over to total solitude’. Like Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel, Pontormo’s frescoes in San Lorenzo depicted events from the beginning and end of the Bible: on one wall, from the early chapters of Genesis, the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah’s Flood; on another, the resurrection of the dead from the final chapters of Revelation, with Christ on high in judgment above them. ‘I have never understood the doctrine of this scene,’ Vasari writes, treading with considerable care. ‘That is, what he wished to signify in the part of the painting where Christ on high is raising the dead while at His feet God the Father is creating Adam and Eve.’ Vasari’s doctrinal doubts may be the reason for his faint praise of the composition. In the Mannerist figures, he sees ‘nothing of that skill and singular grace’ Pontormo had previously displayed:

Jacopo, it seems to me, has not observed in any single place the organisation of scenes, measure, time, variety in the faces or changes in the tones of the flesh, nor, in brief, any rules at all either of proportion or perspective … He only thought about certain details, while he took no account whatsoever of the other more important aspects … And in short, whereas he had thought to surpass in this work all the paintings in this craft, he scarcely reached the level of his own works executed in times past.

Binet reproduces this passage, imagining it appearing in a letter Vasari sent to Michelangelo on 7 January 1557. It appears in Perspectives more or less verbatim, though slightly abridged – and of course translated into French, which Sam Taylor has then turned into a breezier modern English idiom (‘he fell short of his own standards’) than the translation of the Lives by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella that I’ve just quoted from.

Perspectives (the French title has brackets around the final, unpronounced ‘s’) is an epistolary novel, with twenty correspondents: more than twice as many as in Les Liaisons dangereuses and almost as many as in Clarissa. As a framing device there is a brief preface by the purported translator of the letters into French, signed only B., which could stand for Binet except that the writer refers to ‘our own 19th century’. Or he does in Taylor’s English translation, at least. In French he says only ‘d’aujourd’hui’. Perhaps the style is obviously 19th-century enough for it not to need spelling out; my French isn’t good enough to tell. B. mock-grudgingly includes a list of correspondents for the reader’s convenience: ‘I almost said characters!’ – this novel is nothing if not knowing.

B. claims to have found the ‘collection of old, yellowed letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his colossal poem The Ring and the Book, which over the course of twelve books and 21,000 lines tells and retells the story of the murder from multiple perspectives. But where Browning – a close reader of Vasari – uses an elaborate analogy of a goldsmith crafting a ring to describe the artistic process by which he transforms the ‘pure crude fact’ of the old yellow book into his poem, Binet’s B. poses only as the translator of the letters he claims to have found. Someone else has already organised them into a story: ‘Whoever was responsible for the monumental task of collecting and ordering them did a magnificent job.’ That responsibility ultimately lies with Binet, of course. It takes a certain confidence to create a character so full of praise for their author, but in this case the confidence is not misplaced: the tale is as compelling as B. insists it is.

Pontormo’s murder is far from the only intrigue in the novel. Cosimo is trying to cosy up to Pope Paul IV – aka Gian Pietro Carafa, former head of the Roman Inquisition and scourge of Protestants, Jews, improper books and indecent paintings – in the hope of being crowned king of Tuscany, rather than merely duke of Florence. Cosimo’s wife is Eleanor of Toledo, the niece of Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (governor of Milan, viceroy of Naples and not yet the iron duke of the Netherlands), who is besieging Rome on behalf of Philip II of Spain after the pope stripped Philip of the title of king of Naples. Catherine de’ Medici, Cosimo’s fourth cousin once removed, is queen of France by marriage to Henri II, who is allied with the pope against Spain. More important, for our purposes, is that Queen Catherine, a direct descendant of Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent, views her contemporary Cosimo as an interloper in the Palazzo della Signoria. She’s conspiring to overthrow him with Piero Strozzi, her first cousin, exiled from Florence after losing to Cosimo in the 1537 Battle of Montemurlo and now marshal of France. It’s one of Binet’s achievements that the convoluted politics of Renaissance Europe underpin the plot of his novel without overshadowing it.

Catherine and Piero’s scheme in the novel – which has no basis in history, as far as I’m aware – is to steal a scandalous painting discovered in Pontormo’s studio after his death. Cosimo’s eldest daughter, Maria de’ Medici, describes it in a letter to her ‘aunt’ Catherine, whom she mistakenly imagines wishing her well: ‘Venus (supposedly the goddess of love), naked, her thighs spread wide, with plump Cupid’s leg sliding between them, and – I would rather die than have to write these lines – this Roman harlot had my face!’ It’s a Renaissance deepfake. There is a Venus and Cupid by Pontormo, based on a lost drawing by Michelangelo, which now hangs in the Accademia in Florence. A detail from it appears on the cover of the English translation of Perspectives. It fits the description of the scandalous painting in the novel, except no one could mistake the face of Venus for Maria’s: the goddess looks like a Michelangelo, a relative of the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and nothing like any of the paintings of young women that have been identified (none of them 100 per cent reliably) as portraits of Maria. The French cover shows the face from one of those portraits, by Alessandro Allori, crudely superimposed over the face of Venus in Pontormo’s painting with a trompe-l’oeil paper clip.

Maria hasn’t seen the painting herself; she’s only heard about it from one of her father’s pages, Malatesta de’ Malatesti. He, too, despite his unlikely sounding name, is drawn (very freely) from a historical original. Maria is grateful to him for the way he ‘took pity’ on her, telling her about the painting so she wouldn’t be the last to know, and, having told her, ‘comforted’ her. Readers of Maria’s letter, not least Queen Catherine, are likely to doubt Malatesta’s motives. But who else is Maria to turn to? She pleads with her father to destroy the painting, but he says he’s going to keep it in his ‘wardrobe’ – his modest name for ‘an enormous room where hundreds of artisans come and go fifty times a day’ – until the mystery of Pontormo’s murder is solved.

Queen Catherine appears to be all sympathy in her replies to her niece, while at the same time urging Strozzi to hire someone to steal the painting, take it to Venice and get copies made for widespread distribution: the humiliation of Maria, Catherine thinks, will taint her father, ‘permanently weakening his authority’. (The novel implicitly raises, without answering, the riddles of why such a painting would need to be an actual likeness of Maria to serve Catherine’s purpose, since most people outside her immediate circle would have no idea what she actually looks like; why everyone is so sure it really is her likeness; and why Cosimo couldn’t just flatly deny it.) To carry out the theft, Strozzi turns to the dastardly Benvenuto Cellini: goldsmith, sculptor, adventurer, ‘murderer, thief, infidel, sodomite’ and author of an extremely lively and unreliable autobiography. Its style is evident in his letters to Strozzi, which are full of assurances that the plan is proceeding swimmingly, interspersed with self-serving excuses for why the painting is not yet in his possession. At one point he claims to have leaped from the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, landing unhurt in a conveniently parked hay cart below, as if he were Errol Flynn or Buster Keaton. Never mind that it’s a drop of at least forty metres and no hay cart in the world would save anyone falling from such a height. Cellini’s tall tale is about as plausible as St Lawrence’s apocryphal last words; I don’t think we’re meant to believe him.

Or perhaps we should see such distortions of space as a kind of Mannerist turn in the narrative, a novelist’s way of paying homage to the dead painter and the lost painting at the heart of his story. Time gets distorted too, or foreshortened. To keep the plot moving along within a reasonable timeframe, some of the letters are not only written in extreme haste under circumstances so pressing that you might think it would make writing letters impossible, they also fly across Europe with incredible speed, in some cases reaching Paris from Florence in only two days. This may have been technically feasible – it’s a distance of a thousand kilometres, which a series of horses and riders travelling flat out without a break could cover, at an average speed of 50 kph, in twenty hours, if you ignore the terrain – but doesn’t seem ever to have actually happened. It took eight days, for instance, for the news of Henri IV’s death to reach Venice from Paris in 1610; in general, it took three weeks for the post to get from Rome to Paris. I’m not being merely pedantic: Binet draws the reader’s attention to the question by having a major plot point turn on whether or not it was possible to get from Rome to Florence and back in a night. (Browning may again be helpful here: his poem ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ fairly gallops along, covering a huge distance in a few rapid stanzas: ‘Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace/Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place.’)

Despite Cellini’s quasi-farcical difficulties in extracting the painting from Cosimo’s wardrobe, Maria’s predicament only gets worse. Her father is hoping to marry her off to the son of the duke of Ferrara but, egged on by Queen Catherine, she begins an affair with Malatesta and plans to elope with him to France through a secret tunnel built into Florence’s defensive walls by their architect, Michelangelo. But Malatesta abandons Maria, pregnant, and Ferrara isn’t prepared to go along with Cosimo’s plan to expedite the wedding and pass the child off as legitimate. This could be a lucky escape: as the list of dramatis personae reminds us, Maria’s fiancé is ‘the notorious Alfonso II d’Este, who would inspire Browning’s “My Last Duchess”’. Following the historical Maria’s premature death, Alfonso married her younger sister Lucrezia. She died soon afterwards, and Browning wasn’t the only one to suspect foul play. Maggie O’Farrell’s novel The Marriage Portrait takes the opening lines of ‘My Last Duchess’ as one of its epigraphs, and reimagines the story of Lucrezia’s marriage from her point of view. It’s a more conventional historical novel than Perspectives: there’s more descriptive writing, for one thing, which would be out of place in an epistolary novel; Binet’s correspondents all already know what a 16th-century Italian city looks, sounds and smells like, and don’t need to tell one another. In many ways it’s a more serious novel too: with imaginative generosity, O’Farrell treats Lucrezia’s interior life fully and seriously.* There is, by contrast, something cruel about the way Binet relegates Maria’s anguish to a subplot in Perspectives – of little consequence in the end even to those who set her ruin in motion – though perhaps that is true to the cruelty of the time and place she lived in, and of the company she was compelled to keep.

Maria is soon ruled out as a suspect in Pontormo’s murder, but there’s no shortage of other possible culprits. Marco Moro, Pontormo’s colour grinder, has been organising secret meetings of workers at San Lorenzo after dark. He addresses them as ‘comrades’ and has even written an anachronistic manifesto that begins: ‘A spectre haunts Italy – the spectre of the Ciompi Revolt!’ Then there are all the other artists: Cellini, we know, is capable of murder. But what about Bronzino, who after Pontormo’s death was awarded the commission to finish the frescoes? Or his assistant, Allori, whose painting appears on the cover of the French edition of Perspective(s)? Or Pontormo’s own assistant, Giambattista Naldini, who will later work with Vasari on decorating the Palazzo della Signoria? Or Plautilla Nelli, a Dominican nun, a follower of the teachings of Savonarola and a self-taught painter whose remarkable Last Supper now hangs in Santa Maria Novella?

The key to the mystery, Vasari decides, lies in a repainted portion of Pontormo’s depiction of the Flood. Around Noah’s head, ‘the subtlety of the line and the beauty of the rendering shine through just as brightly as all the rest,’ as Bronzino puts it in a letter to Michelangelo, but there is a ‘slight excess of acidity in the colours’. This leads Vasari to believe that it ‘was not the work of Pontormo himself but of his murderer or of someone present at the moment he was killed’. It can’t have been Moro, the colour grinder, because he wouldn’t have got the colours wrong. And it can’t have been Nelli, Vasari concludes, because she’s better at painting women’s faces than men’s, and though ‘able to add Miss Maria’s face to Venus’s body’, is supposedly not up to painting ‘the head and body of Noah in the same style as Pontormo, to the point that the forgery is almost impossible to discern’.

Vasari​ clearly has his hobby-horses as well as his prejudices, and you have to wonder if he hasn’t got completely the wrong end of the stick (or paintbrush). Nelli is not responsible for the Maria/Venus deepfake, but because of Vasari’s unfounded suspicions she is very nearly hanged for it. Perhaps it’s all, as the novel’s title implies, a question of perspective(s). Except perspective, in a technical artistic sense, doesn’t mean that everyone has their own point of view; on the contrary, it fixes the objective co-ordinates of the world. There’s a half-comic scene in which Vasari describes to Michelangelo how he is able to load a crossbow because he remembers a sketch by Leonardo, and then to fire it accurately thanks to his grasp of the laws of perspective:

I saw the lines being drawn through space, forming a geometric grid, and I recognised Alberti’s diagram, his pyramid of spokes converging on a single point … and in the space of a second the world appeared to me as a flat surface, adroitly squared, in all the dazzling clarity of the theory that was revealed to us by those supreme geniuses: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio … And so, as the killer was about to fire at me … I saw – yes, I saw! – the vanishing point drawn on his forehead as if by Alberti himself.

Michelangelo replies, more solemnly, that ‘Brunelleschi’s discovery of the laws of perspective was like Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to mankind … Perspective gave us the image of infinity on Earth … Even if we could not conceive it, we could represent it.’ Where could art go after that? Mannerism, which took those laws and distorted them, offered one answer. In Binet’s novel, everything comes to a head in suitably dramatic fashion with the great flood of September 1557, when the Arno bursts its banks and inundates the city, almost as if Noah’s flood has spilled out of Pontormo’s painting, breaking out of its two-dimensional bounds. And the murderer is revealed, in true whodunnit fashion, to be the least likely suspect.

As for what lies behind the mystery of the repainted portion of Pontormo’s fresco, if like me you were vaguely hoping for some literal-minded variation on the theme of buried treasure – like Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari, for instance, which may or may not exist, in a more or less unfinished state, on a secret wall concealed behind Vasari’s frescoes in the Palazzo della Signoria’s Salone dei Cinquecento – then you should be prepared for disappointment, or seek solace in such lower-order stories as The Da Vinci Code. And remember that the laws of perspective enable an artist, through the skilful manipulation of surfaces, to create an illusion of depth.