Brian Dillon
Laurent Binet’s book combines metafiction, baroque allegory, erudite citation, genre pillage, and the novel of aesthetic ideas.
Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 264 pages, $28
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In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari tells us that the Florentine painter Jacopo da Pontormo (1494‒1557) was “a man without a firm and steady mind and who always went about indulging in fanciful ideas.” (Quick: look up his stark, near-monochrome portrait of Maria Salviati with Giulia de’ Medici, or his pinky-blue-blonde deposition of Christ.) Vasari has in mind the artist’s decision to render his 1525 Resurrection in soft, radiant, heavenly colors but decidedly worldly forms, modeled after prints by Albrecht Dürer. Enthusiastic pilferage and disregard for stylistic distinctions: these might be defining symptoms of the Mannerism of which Pontormo was a master. What else? Dizzy torsions of perspective; dainty heads atop long, rippled, surging bodies; a tendency for human figures to resemble statues—or long-fingered shop mannequins. What would this stretchy aesthetic look like in fiction? Maybe something akin to Laurent Binet’s new epistolary novel, Perspective(s), in which Pontormo is a deceased presence whose perverse take on sacred and profane art informs and infects how this self-aware detective story may be told.
Binet’s first bit of sly stage business is to add a preface by one “B.,” who affects to have found the letters that follow in an antique shop in Tuscany, then spent three years translating them for “the French reader from our own nineteenth century.” The framing note and accidental discovery of the manuscript you are about to read are conventions of—yes, nineteenth-century fiction. Everything is at once further away and closer to the viewer-reader than may seem. (Add to which ambivalence, Sam Taylor’s lively translation.) In the tale that unfolds, Pontormo has apparently been murdered (hammer, chisel) while at work in the chapel of San Lorenzo on frescoes depicting the Last Judgement and other Biblical scenes. The crime is Binet’s own flourish, but the frescoes are real, or, rather, were: today, only preparatory sketches, a few partial copies, and written descriptions remain of Pontormo’s writhing bodies of the dead, of which Vasari wrote that he had abandoned all rules of proportion, composition, and perspective. Who has put an end to Pontormo, and who among the jealous, contending Florentine artists might be able to finish his project?
The second question is doubly knotted, because another piece by the murdered painter has been found, and then hidden away: a Venus and Cupid in which somebody with Pontormo’s skill has replaced, to potentially scandalous effect, the face of the goddess with that of Cosimo de’ Medici’s daughter Maria. Around these mysteries gathers a scheming conclave of correspondents, with whose viewpoints and blind spots Binet has a great deal of narrative and tonal fun. None other than Vasari is employed by Cosimo to solve the case. Great names of Italian art—Michelangelo, Agnolo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, and others—feature implausibly as messengers, thieves, theorists of the crime, defenders of aesthetic ideals, or grifters with an eye always on aristocratic favor. Playful subplots weave around this main story, like the sinuous lines of Mannerism itself. Maria de’ Medici is in danger of eloping to France with a young knight, turning herself into a character from Boccaccio’s Decameron, while writing dangerously guileless letters to her aunt Catherine. Meantime, a color grinder named Marco Moro is trying to whip the workers of Florence into revolutionary frenzy—a specter is haunting Italy, he tells them, quoting The Communist Manifesto three centuries early.
How much of this summoning of other writings is mere paratextual pizzazz on Binet’s part, how much meant to have been interposed by B., his nineteenth-century stand-in? In a novel this saturated with self-aware wit, it’s probably both. Perspective(s) has an obvious precursor in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in which the semiotic theorist essayed at length—the first one hundred pages, Eco said, were a test of readerly attention or boredom—a mash-up of Borges, Conan Doyle, and medieval scholasticism. Binet includes aspects of the gossipy side of Vasari’s Lives, echoes of Les liaisons dangereuses, and the inherent comedy of the novel-in-letters, where nobody is ever really being themselves on the page. But the main intertext is surely Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” which invents so much of the modern detective story, including forensic analysis and plain-sight chicanery. In Perspective(s), it’s Cellini who is dispatched to find Venus and Cupid concealed in a cabinet of curiosities—and who likes foolishly to crow about his powers of subterfuge and divination.
Actually, most of the characters in this smart and funny novel think of themselves as consummate intriguers; in comedy, after all, nobody is inherently good, though they may be stupid. Still, there is a running and not wholly ironic reflection here on aesthetics and politics: a study, in its arch and antic way, of the possibility of art as such at a time of state or church censorship and the patronage, hard to resist, of rich, powerful, and capricious monsters. Michelangelo, representing an older and supposedly purer order, bemoans the bad outlook for art and artists. Depictions of nude flesh have been outlawed, and artistic nuns pretend to appalled piety in the face of Pontormo’s “sodomitic” art, while secretly relishing such images, and being themselves suspected of the scurrilous addition to the Venus and Cupid. Perhaps Pontormo’s extravagant, deforming vision is the proper response to such times.
In which case, one also has to ask: What is the purpose of Binet’s reflexively Mannerist writing right now? His previous books have tended to self-consciousness and more or less absurd rewriting of history, whether it’s a comic reenactment of aspects of French intellectual life in The Seventh Function of Language (2015), or the conquering of Europe by the Incas in Civilizations (2019). In some ways, Perspective(s) is more obviously an entertainment, but it’s also a reminder that metafiction, baroque allegory, erudite citation, genre pillage, and the novel of aesthetic ideas are not just the preserve of a now-distant postmodernism. As well as being enjoyably devious, they have been around for centuries, and they might offer one good hope of outflanking the blanker ironies and implacable cultural ordinances of our own time.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence: An Education.