Florenzer (4*)

When I picked up Phil Melanson's queer historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci, I figured the title referred to a native of Florence, where I'd just spent four days.  Wrong!

Go to the Hapsburg court up in the Alps and ask someone how to say sodomite. Florenzer, they’ll tell you. 

Such actions aren’t confined within the walls of Florence, of course. Sodomy exists anywhere there are men with cocks and men with holes. Which is everywhere, really, except for the convents—and there the nuns have their own methods. But does anyone condone it? Certainly not. These are Christian lands. 

Apparently some critics have complained about the liberties Melanson has taken in imagining the specifics of da Vinci's sexual orientation, but they rang so true that I immediately searched the internet for an incomplete portrait of Saint Sebastian (one of my photographic obsessions) to 1) find out if it existed and 2) to see what Leonardo's boyfriend, the model, looked like (in fact, the real da Vinci drew an incomplete sketch).

Iac may never have lived, but Melanson employs him less a real person than a symbol of forbidden first love, the kind that cuts deepest.  The reader sees the character only through Leonardo's eyes, as a young prostitute who aspires to gold smithing when the city they inhabit is known throughout the world for the beauty that it produces. 

Melanson makes the Saint Sebastian metaphor work overtime.  Near the novel's end, Leonardo's father reveals his heretofore unexpressed disgust with his illegitimate son's homosexuality, cataloging all the signs that have been evident since childhood.

He [Leonardo] is Sebastian, struck with arrows, one by one. 

The rupture affords Leonardo a Renaissance way of "coming out."  With nothing left to lose (he previously has been arrested for sodomy and briefly imprisoned, an experience so traumatic that it induces both celibacy and artistic inertia), he can refuse a commission from Lorenzo Medici, the ruler of the Republic of Florence, whose story, told in parallel, provides Melanson with a fruitful opportunity to explore the competing power centers of the era, and free Leonardo to become arguably the world's most famous painter.

Although the easily-consumed Florenzer bears a strong resemblance to a screenplay, particularly in a tripartite narrative structure that relies on cross cutting--Melanson worked in film marketing before writing this, his first novel--there's much that sticks, including deft portraits of Lucrezia, Lorenzo Medici's wise but conniving mother, and Francesco Salviati, an embittered priest in service to a corrupt pope who favors his "nephews" when assigning plum bishoprics.

If Melanson is less convincing in his depiction of Lorenzo Medic that may reflect an unfamiliarity--or lack of sympathy--with a heterosexual point of view if not the historical record which he claims to have followed accurately.  Miserable and unattractive, especially in contrast to his handsome, happy-go-lucky brother who recognizes da Vinci's talent and yearns to marry outside his class, Lorenzo both relies on and resents his mother to the exclusion of nearly all other relationships.  This dynamic seems improbable in a society as patriarchal as Italy's was at the time and remained until the end of the last century.  Unlike the man who relied only on his skill and imagination for his life's work, Lorenzo, who died at 43 (the same year that Columbus didn't discover America) had a lot on his plate.

"Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici" by Giorgio Vasari (1534)

In the appealing but anachronistic world of Florenzer, only one of them gets a happy ending.