Florence in 1557 wasn’t what it used to be. Leonardo and Raphael were both dead, and Michelangelo, now an old man, had moved to Rome, burdened with the monumental task of remodelling St Peter’s. A chill had settled over the city. Duke Cosimo de’ Medici ruled with an iron grip, fearful of his mortal enemy, Piero Strozzi, who had become marshal of France under Cosimo’s cousin Catherine, queen of France. A spirit of censoriousness emanated from Cosimo’s religiose Spanish wife, Eleanor of Toledo. The High Renaissance mode had warped into Mannerism, a style of affectless polish and gymnastic contortions whose preeminent exponents in Florence were Pontormo and his pupil Bronzino. 

Laurent Binet’s latest novel begins with Pontormo’s death in 1557. Over the preceding eleven years, he had been working on a series of frescos – now lost – for the church of San Lorenzo. As with Binet’s earlier book The 7th Function of Language, a caper about the traffic accident that killed Roland Barthes, the novel proceeds from the idea that the death was, in fact, a murder. There are suspects everywhere: fellow painters, insurrectionary apprentices, maybe even the duke himself. In pursuit of the perpetrator – as well as an obscene portrait of one of the Medici brood that seems, relatedly, to have disappeared from Pontormo’s house – is the prosopographer of the Renaissance and second-rate artist Giorgio Vasari, here transformed into a put-upon factotum of Cosimo.

The detective story sits easily inside the art novel: the detective and the critic are both trained to find devils in the details. Close reading of iconography can tease out the esoteric – often heretical – meaning of a painting. Robert Langdon, the Harvard-based professor of ‘symbology’ in the novels