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Perspective

Laurent Binet,

Sam Taylor (translator)

Start date: August 26, 2025

Discussion: 2025 Buddy Reads

Why we're reading this: Buddyread 26 August 2025
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What Members Thought

Jan 06, 2024 Ruben rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: must-read-2024

Laurent Binet always writes novels I want to read, whether it's about Heydrich, Atahualpa or, in this case, Michaelangelo.

This latest one is a detective story, and may not be for everyone, but for me few things are more exciting than an epistolary murder mystery set among the top politicians and artists of Renaissance Florence.

The year is 1557, Cosimo de Medici rules Florence and the painter Jacopo Pontormo is found murdered in the San Lorenzo chapel, where he had been working for ten years on ...more

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May 26, 2025 Peggy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Do you like epistolary novels and 16th century Florence (with a side of Rome and a sprinkle of France)? Do you like a juicy murder and art heists? Then this is the book/caper for you!

Here Binet takes on the real artists, movers & shakers of 1550s Florence with no fewer than 20 characters writing letters back and forth, telling on each other and themselves. We get Michelangelo, a bevy of Medici family folks, including the Duke of Florence and the Queen of France, bitter enemies, the latter of who Do you like epistolary novels and 16th century Florence (with a side of Rome and a sprinkle of France)? Do you like a juicy murder and art heists? Then this is the book/caper for you!

Here Binet takes on the real artists, movers & shakers of 1550s Florence with no fewer than 20 characters writing letters back and forth, telling on each other and themselves. We get Michelangelo, a bevy of Medici family folks, including the Duke of Florence and the Queen of France, bitter enemies, the latter of whom uses the Duke's daughter in a private war to humiliate the Duke. But it all begins with the murder of an old artist who trained under Michelangelo and was at wits' end trying to complete frescoes for the Duke in an age when nudity in art was frowned upon (thanks, Pope!).

The triumph of this book is the varying voices each letter embodies: whining nuns, a clueless ingenue and the knave seducing her; a queen, a duke, a duchess, and their "fixers." Particularly the artist and miscreant Cellini who thinks verrrrrry highly of himself and his ability to pull off the incredible. He factors in to many heists, specifically a "lascivious" portrait of Venus that our murdered artist painted with the face of Maria, the Duke's daughter, as a kind of F-off to the constraints placed on him. The Queen of France wants it, Cellini acquires it (kind of) and chaos ensues. And threaded throughout, the artists just trying to bring forth beauty as they see it, freely and without constraint. Hence the "Perspective(s)" of the title gains multiple meanings; we get the perspectives of each letter writer as well as the concept of perspective in art where, in one hilarious set piece, an artist suddenly "sees" the lines of perspective running to the vanishing point, enabling him to fire a crossbow into an adversary's forehead--the vanishing point of course.

So this is a fun, often confusing (see the 20+ characters and their 200+ letters), extremely overstuffed caper. It takes real people and puts them in a farce with many unbelievable, hyperbolic elements. Perhaps it is asking what is the purpose, or limits. of art, but I don't think it achieves the depth that topic suggests. Still, the pages turn and the voices sing (I loved the Queen's plotting and acerbic wit, myself). The murderer is maybe the most unbelievable part of all, but who cares? It's all for the love of art. ...more

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