The HHhH author’s entertaining whodunnit is stuffed with real-life artists behaving badly

Florence, 1557. A painter is murdered with a hammer blow to the head and a chisel to the heart. It looks as though someone has painted over a section of the frescoes he has been labouring on for years at the church of San Lorenzo. But who could have killed old Jacopo da Pontormo, and why?

So begins this historical epistolary detective novel, stuffed with real-life Renaissance artists behaving badly. Investigating the murder at the behest of the duke, Cosimo de’ Medici, is Giorgio Vasari, painter and author of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Not exempt from suspicion is Agnolo Bronzino, commissioned here (as in fact) to finish his deceased master’s frescoes, since lost. In their time they drew comparisons to the Sistine Chapel, and indeed one of Vasari’s penpals is the great Michelangelo himself, resentful at being stuck in Rome building the dome of St Peter’s. “These are cruel times, my friend, for the defenders of art and beauty,” Michelangelo writes – as they always have been and shall remain.