Florenzer by Phil Melanson

Set in Renaissance Florence, Phil Melanson's  debut novel Florenzer reimagines the intersecting lives of three men, a banker, a priest and a young artist - Leonardo da Vinci.

Brash and breathtaking, this lush historical drama explores the dangerous pursuit of artistic and political achievement-especially at a time when "florenzers," or gay men such as Leonardo, were often persecuted.
 
15th-century Florence: where the river runs red with slaughterhouse blood and bronze statues glow in every square. Into its fold comes a young Leonardo da Vinci. Wayward and dreamy, he is different from the other artist’s apprentices, drawn to what passes behind veils of steam in the baths and along the moonlit banks of the Arno.
 
Such habits have long belonged to Florence, but they carry risk in a city where anonymous accusations slipped into letterboxes destroy reputations overnight.
 
Alongside Leonardo, two men pursue their own forms of immortality: Francesco Salviati, a priest willing to endure any degradation in the name of salvation, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, heir to a great banking fortune, for whom wealth proves a shifting, uncertain thing.
 
Weaving together these three lives, Florenzer is a sensuous and richly imagined portrait of a city that paints over its own decay; where an untested artist, not yet marked by greatness, will dare to follow his most unholy desires.
 
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'A captivating portrait of an all-too-human genius - subtle, erudite and exquisitely sexy' - James Cahill
 
'Introduces us to a teenage Leonardo still struggling to find himself amid the roiling artistic and political atmosphere of late-15th-century Florence . . . For a young man sexually attracted to other young men, this can be particularly dangerous . . . Yet his work may be his salvation.' - New York Times
 
'The novel, which owes a debt to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy in the detail and immediacy of its telling, feels freshly contemporary in its papal intrigue and plutocratic power battles’ - Washington Post
 
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