FLORENZER
by Phil Melanson
Liveright Publishing Company
368 pages. $29.99
HISTORICAL NOVELS teeter between fiction and fact. To make the story believable, the author must imbue the characters with enough personal complexity to resonate with a contemporary audience. Yet the writer is also constrained by what actually happened.
Phil Melanson keeps Florenzer engaging by setting this novel about Leonardo da Vinci amid a power struggle between the Pope and the Medici family of Florence. We meet Leonardo as a young apprentice who is striving to establish himself, break with his overbearing father, and yet win his approval. Yet nothing comes easily for an upstart artist amid the intrigues of the Medicis, who have enormous wealth as bankers but are at war with the Pope, who envies and despises them. Leonardo’s struggle is complicated by his recognition that he’s gay, which means he could face public humiliation or even death. Lorenzo de Medici, the twenty-year-old ruler of Florence, wants to “clean up” the city, which has a reputation as a haven for homosexuals such that the common word for homosexual in German was “Florenzer.”
Although Leonardo plays a central role, the novel’s plot is far-reaching. The cast of characters runs three pages and includes the political elites of Florence, loyalists to the Pope, apprentices, and dukes from other Italian cities. Each chapter begins with one of these characters in their own domain, observing the space and pondering what will happen to them. We have an insider’s view of their challenges. Eventually, like chords in a symphony, these different points of view lead us into the rising tension that will disrupt Leonardo’s dream of becoming an established artist. The papal plot to assassinate Lorenzo fails. The assassins are hanged in the public square. The Papal State declares war and besieges Florence.
Amid all this drama, Leonardo will develop as an artist, fall in love with one of his models, be commissioned to paint for the Medicis, be arrested for sodomy, become an outcast, and find a new direction after Florence is besieged. The thread holding the story together is how Leonardo comes to terms with his dangerous love for the model Iac and, later, his apprentice Atalante. He is made to be, like any young man coming to face his same-sex attractions, both vulnerable and believable. This stands in contrast to the other characters, all men who are also well-portrayed but who aspire to power and are hampered by their need to conform to the pressures of being rulers and public figures.
Leonardo is an artist who aspires to paint what he truly sees, almost in reproach to what others in polite society chose not see. Melanson has walked the tightrope of history and fiction to demonstrate how the age-old struggle to be true to oneself was as real for Leonardo as it is for any LGBT person in these times, when our own leaders want, once again, to disparage us, making us Florenzer. Leonardo outlived those who sought to defame him and changed how we perceive the world. That may be a good lesson for today.
Bruce Spang is a poet and writer living in Chandler, North Carolina.
