Florence is a city of secrets, and for many years now I’ve been obsessed with one in particular. I have always wanted to know what lay behind Botticelli’s famous painting La Primavera. The debate has baffled scholars for centuries – who are the nine mysterious figures of the scene, and what does the painting actually mean? This was a question that interested me so much I wrote a book about it; The Botticelli Secret. 

My novel places at its heart one the newer interpretations of the painting. Professor Enrico Guidoni of the University of Rome posited the notion that the figures represent Renaissance cities and the panel hides a political message. In my novel Luciana Vetra, a notorious Florentine whore, goes on the run around Renaissance Italy, pursued by murderous assassins, in a race against time to decode the painting. Her partner in crime is Brother Guido, a young sprig of Pisan nobility from the Franciscan monastery of Santa Croce. Together they uncover what is, in fact, The Botticelli Secret.

I’m in Florence with my husband Sacha – who has gamely agreed to be my Brother Guido for this trip – on a mission to replicate the journey of my characters. Luciana and Guido first meet on the Ponte Vecchio and we lean on the balustrade in the morning sun, debating where to begin. 

The obvious thought is with Botticelli’s house, and we plunge into the dark streets well off the tourist track. We trawl up and down the Via Porcellina where the great man’s house was said to stand, but the actual location is anybody’s guess; the house, if it still stands, is unmarked.

Vaguely disappointed, we take the next logical step, and head for the Piazza della Signoria to start with the painting itself.

The smart money visits the Uffizi at the crack of dawn. We are not the smart money. It’s mid morning and there are queues round the block. We wait, complaining of the Easter tourists, conveniently forgetting we are of their number, but when we eventually reach the cool interior and stand in front of the of the painting it’s all worth while. This is where Botticelli lives, not in the dingy backstreets. In England everything is in aspic, with blue plaques and visitor’s centres. It’s something we do rather well. But I’m beginning to understand why Italians don’t celebrate a house. The man lives in his work.

The painting is glorious, bigger than you’d think, the outlines pin-sharp, the colours jewel bright, you’d think it was painted yesterday, whereas history tells us it was painted in 1482 as a wedding gift from Lorenzo the Magnificent for his ward, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici.  Luciana was the model for the most alluring of all the figures – Flora (Florence) She’s covered in the flowers  – FLORA which give us the clue to her city’s identity. A secret smile curves her lips and she gives nothing away, but above her head Cupid’s arrow provides a clue, pointing very definitely to the flame-haired maiden in the centre of the three graces. It’s a clue to the next city,Florence’s beautiful neighbour Pisa, and the arrow leads us to our next Florentine destination, the home of a certain Pisan monk.

It’s a short walk to the church of Santa Croce, which stands sentinel over a broad and sun-baked piazza. The serene frontage hides a violent history. Just inside the wrought-iron gates, across a manicured square of lawn, strands a squat, round chapel. This is the chapel of the Pazzi family, the deadly rivals to the Medici, who murdered Giuliano de Medici ‘Becket-style’ in the Duomo. The story goes that they hacked at the unfortunate Giuliano’s head so savagely that his skull split like a melon.

The Florence of the Medici and the Pazzi was a violent place, and I wanted to reflect this in my novel. So in the centre of the peaceful cloister is the site of another violent episode – this time a fictional one. It’s the well where, in The Botticelli Secret, Brother Guido finds librarian Brother Remigio, whose head falls from his shoulders down the shaft.

And just across the grass is Brother Guido’s sanctuary, the cell where he practices his religious contemplation before Luciana turns his world upside down.

Every heroine needs a hero, and here we have found the home of Luciana’s soulmate, Brother Guido della Torre. And here is a reminder in stone of why I placed him here; there is a roundel above the architrave, and if you look closely it shows, quite clearly, a leaning tower.

So now we have an author, a heroine and a hero. But what is The Botticelli Secret?

Well, I won’t give it away here. But the answer lies, in part, in these peaceful cloisters. On their return to Florence after they flee for their lives, Luciana and Guido find themselves back in these very cloisters, and seek out the company of aged herbalist Nicodemus of Padua, a brother of the order of Santa Croce. It is the herbalist who, in many ways, unlocks the secret of the painting. For appropriately – as this is the story of Flora, in Florence – the secret lies in the flowers; those jewel-like flowers studding the grass, painted painstakingly by Sandro Botticelli. Five centuries later, they are still blooming in the Uffizi gallery.

I read it as a teenager, probably too young to understand it all, but was immediately captivated by the hermetic world of a monastery beset by the Inquisition. The literati, I am sure, would baulk at the idea of Umberto Eco even being mentioned in the same breath as Dan Brown; but the two writers do have something in common. The Name of the Rose had, at its dark heart, a mystery. A riddle. The Name of the Rose, though a difficult and very literary novel, began a trend; the code novel was born.

After this baptism of fire, plague and all the other evils of the Apocalypse, I began to seek out historical treasure hunts. This was at a time when artist and jewel-making genius Kit Williams hit on the idea of tying in a literal treasure hunt to a book; Williams created a golden gem in the shape of a hare, hung about with moonstones and pearls, and buried it somewhere on public land in the English countryside. The whole of England went, briefly, treasure mad, and pored over the pages of Masquerade – still one of the most beautiful books I have ever read – forensically scrutinizing the exquisite illustrations for clues.

Then came perhaps my favourite treasure hunt novel of all; Landscape of Lies by Peter Watson. I was captivated by the plot of an art dealer who stumbled upon an obscure painting, and gradually realized that what he had found was a treasure map. The edition I read recreated the painting on the front and back cover, rendered in very fine detail, and you could spot the clues along with protagonist Michael Whiting. Erudite but fast paced, this remains my favourite in the burgeoning crop of ‘treasure hunt’ novels.

I continued to seek out code books; and then, of course, in the early noughties, the ultimate code novel appeared. I did, I admit, love The Da Vinci Code when it came out – by some strange accident I read it before the hype reached me, and really enjoyed it (although I do still prefer Angels and Demons). It had all that I required, a page turning mystery, a setting that interested me, and I learned along the way. 

Since then I’ve read some code books that are silly but enormous fun; and that’s all right too. You don’t want to read The Name of the Rose every day, and code books are ideal models opportunities for a bit of light escapism. The Shakespeare Secret, The Righteous Men, The Medici Secret, The Last Templar; all of them fall in to this category. They are not necessarily hugely historically accurate, but you certainly turn the pages. Some code books are more erudite – I’m guessing that Dan Brown’s latest work might have more than a little in common with Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club, where a mysterious assassin stalks post-Civil War Boston dispatching his victims with the hellish punishments featured in Dante’s Inferno. Pearl’s novel is given an intriguing twist by the fact that the investigators in the story are Boston’s finest poets – Longfellow and Lowell included – turned detective. And if you miss a bit of monastic mystery, try The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra. Inquisitor Father Augustino undertakes an investigation of the same painting at the centre of the Da Vinci Code; Leonardo’s Last Supper. This book, too, has a wonderfully rendered ‘gatefold’ cover with the painting on it, so that when reading about the ‘clues’ you can constantly refer to the artwork itself.  I myself was very excited when the Uffizi Gallery in Florence agreed to license Botticelli’s Primavera to me for the cover of my own code book The Botticelli Secret. And even more excited when the Uffizi gift shop stocked the book, stacked in the shelves three floor below the real thing. 

There are even codes within the code books. If you read enough of them you begin to see a pattern. There is often a man – usually some sort of expert – hooking up with a beautiful woman on the quest. These men, the antecedents and successors to Brown’s Robert Langdon, always seem to be making the vital discoveries and explaining complicated points of history to their decorative female sidekicks. In Brown’s work Langdon has a Captain Kirk tendency to change his girlfriends for each book. Maybe things did not work out with Sophie Neveu from the Da Vinci code. Maybe it was the in-laws…you know, the Nazareths. 

Kathy Reichs subverted the trope by making her female protagonist – Temperance Brennan – an expert in her field, who would make all the major discoveries ahead of the men. When I wrote my own code novel The Botticelli Secret, I too followed the guy/gal prototype. Here too the man was the ‘expert’ – novice monk and all-round know-it-all Brother Guido. But my heroine was a street-wise Florentine whore; Luciana Vetra. She was essentially ignorant, and could not quote Ficino or Poliziano as Guido could, but was worldly where Guido was sheltered and innocent. In Renaissance Italy street-smarts were essential, so I tried to destabilize the idea of the male expert leading the chase – Guido had to defer to Luciana as often as she did to him. In fact, Guido could not have gone twenty steps without Luciana – he would have been dead in a day.

 All code books have a ‘treasure.’ Sometimes it’s literally a hoard of coins. Sometimes (as in The Botticelli Secret and The Da Vinci Code) the treasure is a secret, a secret so great it will change the character’s world. As for Kit William’s golden hare from Masquerade, I can’t actually remember if, or where, the treasure was found. 

It hardly matters. The fun is in the journey.

Ten Code Books

 The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

 Landscape of Lies – Peter Jackson

 The Righteous Men – Sam Bourne

 The Secret Supper – Javier Sierra

 The Shakespeare Secret – JL Carrell

 The Medici Secret – Michael White

 The Dante Club – Matthew Pearl

 The Last Templar – Raymond Khoury

 Cross bones – Kathy Reichs

 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

 …And the most beautiful picture book in the world, Masquerade by Kit Williams

Botticelli and the Art of Reading a Painting 

 It’s tempting to think that we’re getting more and more sophisticated as we forge our way through the 21st century. We’d like to think, I’m sure, that we can look back on the past and find it simplistic, or even primitive.  But in despite of, perhaps because of, all of our technologies, and our multimedia life, the images that fill our world today are actually reasonably simple. Photography, I suppose, must take some responsibility for the erosion of meaning within image – essentially the photograph captures a moment of life, and, unless digital trickery is at play, there are no layers of meaning, just a literal snapshot of a scene. If we take an iconic Athena poster from the eighties, a well muscled man holding a baby, it’s possible, of course, to read into it all kinds of theories about emasculation of males in our society, or working women; but essentially all you’re looking at is a cute baby and a hunky guy; both images designed, aesthetically and biologically, to appeal to women.

 In the Renaissance things were vastly different. I learned this first by looking at a marriage of two mediums in my history class at school. It was a photo of a painting we were studying in relation to the church’s use of art as propaganda: Andrea Firenze’s fresco ‘Triumph of the Church’. It’s a glorious and awe-inspiring piece, complete with a Christ in Judgement, the gates of heaven, and a complete rendering of the Duomo in Florence. But what caught my teenage attention was a pack of dogs at the bottom of the painting. ‘Cute dogs.’ I said to my teacher. ‘Not just that,’ she said, ‘look closer.’ I did. There were a number of black and white dogs playing (or fighting,) with fewer brown ones. The black and white ones always seemed to be winning – they were on top of the brown ones, biting them or rolling them in the dirt. ‘Domini canes,’ said my teacher. ‘Hounds of God. You’ll notice that the black and white ones are overpowering the brown ones. They represent the Dominican monks, who had black and white habits, suppressing the Franciscan monks, who wore brown. The two orders often contested on points of theology.’

 That did it. From that day forward, I was hooked. I began to look for hidden meanings in every painting I saw, and when, a year later, I first stood in front of Botticelli’s La Primavera, I was fascinated by the detail before me. I became one in a long line of people who have set eyes on that great panel and muttered to themselves; ‘It must all mean something. What are all those flowers, those jewels? What are the trees? Why is Venus raising her hand. Why are flowers dropping from Chloris’s mouth? What is Zephyrus’s intention? Why does Mercury stir the clouds? And most intriguing, why does Flora smile like that? For the next twenty years, I started to look, not just see, and began, in part, to understand. Everything, everything, had a meaning, and in some cases more than one.  Grapes could symbolize Christ’s suffering on the cross, as they were the source of communion wine. Pomegranates could indicate the church as the many seeds could represent many souls in the house of God. A glass vessel in a painting of the Annunciation meant the unbroken virginity of the Virgin, and an unlit candle the moment of Christ’s conception – the Light about to enter the world.  The language of religious painting was rife with symbolism, and, with the dawn of the new millennium, these codes became of abiding interest to the bookreading public. It seemed the whole world read one book, and the whole world began to be hooked on finding the meaning in one particular painting. The painting was The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. And the book: The Da Vinci Code. 

 I’m beginning to think the timing was no coincidence. The new millennium was a time for looking back, for looking forward, for looking for meaning at the opening of a century which had begun with the horrors of 9/11. Those of faith, of any faith, and those of no faith at all, were all trying to figure out who they were, where they were going. These questions, at least, we shared with the citizens of Florence in Botticelli’s era. They, too were heading to the end of a century. They, too, were fresh out of a war with another ideology, they, too, were dealing with civil unrest and shocking public violence. The Pazzi Conspiracy saw Florence’s first family attacked with knives in God’s house, the Duomo. In the wake of all this, Botticelli painted his greatest masterpiece for that damaged ruling family, the Medici. 

 Head of the family Lorenzo surrounded himself with poets and thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Angelo Poliziano, men willing to embrace Humanism a philosophical movement which embraced Classical inspiration. Although Humanism wasn’t necessarily at odds with Christianity, in fact Marsilio Ficino wrote at length to bring his particular brand of Humanism in line with the precepts of Christianity, it’s tempting to place a pagan interpretation on the Primavera. The scholar Charles Dempsey points convincingly to the pagan symbolism of the Primavera, with reference to the God Mars, son of Maia, goddess of the May for whom the festival of Calendimaggio is still celebrated in Tuscany. Others, drawn irresistibly to that breathtaking, bewildering carpet of flowers in the painting, have plumped for a botanical interpretation. Mirella Levi D’Ancona has done some painstaking work classifying every plant in the panel and identifying its significance, drawing some fascinating links to astrology and alchemy, that brace of heretical sciences. 

 And then there’s Enrico Guidoni, with his startling notion of political empire building, which was the inspiration for this book. All of these theories, or none of them, could be true, for at the beginning of it all, a man painted this picture, a mortal man, a man who can change. In a few short years from the glories of Venus and Spring, his secular masterpieces, Botticelli turned his back on his work, and embraced God under the influence of fanatical preacher Girolamo Savonarola. It’s possible that Botticelli was instrumental, or at least complicit, in the destruction of some of his own works on that infamous Bonfire of the Vanities. Botticelli had found another idol, and was seemingly, at the end of his life, deaf to the siren call of the golden world of the Medici.

 Opinions or messages within the painting could in themselves, then, be transient. Taking this into account, perhaps the Primavera is a fleeting moment in time captured forever, a unity of briefly-held beliefs detailed minutely in multiple symbols; but as much of a snapshot as a photograph. A cipher that held the secrets of the Renaissance.

 And as for myself? The Botticelli Secret is my own breaking of the code, my own answer to the puzzle of those times. The book is a speculation, and an answer to that question I asked myself twenty years ago. Why does Flora smile like that?

 The Botticelli Secret is out now from John Murray (also available on Kindle).

Well the new book Daughter of Siena comes out tomorrow in hardback – my first hardback ever, woo hoo! The cover is lovely so I hope it will leap off the shelves.

Also just finished and handed in the new manuscript – very scary. A bit like handing in an essay to your headteacher but about a million times more scary waiting for the feedback. This time I have three ‘teachers’ reading it – my agent, my editor and film producer, three scarily intelligent women who all know plot and character backwards. Aaargh. Might retire to the country and throw pots for a living.

Had a great and rare publishing jolly on Tuesday at the RNA lunch in Kensington this week – sat with a great bunch of gals from my agent’s stable and had a lovely time – the champers was flowing! Congratulations to all the nominees/winners especially great family friend Helene Wiggin (Leah Fleming) and thanks to my lovely neighbour Lisa Jewell for letting me cadge a lift in her cab.

Still, I refuse to be downcast. The UK proofs for The Botticelli Secret arrived in the post and now I’m starting to proofread. This is quite a fiddly process and quite painstaking, and will be impossible to concentrate upon fully til the kids go back to school, as you can’t copy out minute proofreading heiroglyphics while simultaneously trying to referee an argument about who’s got the most mini marshmallows on their hot chocolate. The fun bit is getting to read a book you haven’t read since you wrote it. If you’re lucky you’ll enjoy it and thankfully that’s the case here. I’m actually getting caught up in the story, so that’s a great relief. The plot is very different to my past books as it’s much more of a thriller/treasure hunt as the characters race to decode the meaning of a Botticelli painting. Its actually great to be in the company of my heroine again – Chi-chi, full time prostitute and part-time artist’s model – I love her so much I have a feeling I’ll be featuring her again some day.

One funny thing about a career as a writer is how your books begin to overlap each other. I’ve just been working on my fourth book, set in eighteenth-century Siena at the end of the Medici empire, and now I’m temporarily back in fifteenth-century Florence for Botticelli when the Medicis were at their most powerful. Plus, as The Glassblower of Murano has now just become available on iTunes (check it out if, like me, you find it hard to find actual reading time!) I’ve just been listening to the ‘voice’ of my very first heroine, set in modern day Venice. Confusing. Incidentally, Kate Magowan, who brings Glassblower’s Leonora beautifully to life in the recording, is married to John Simm, who I’ve just seen all over the Christmas TV as the scenery-chewing Master in Dr Who. So not only time periods but universes too are collapsing and colliding!

Earlier in the day I was at Warwick University signing copies of both books at a trade fair. It was great meet all the independent booksellers who have been supporting both books in what has been a very difficult economic year for small bookstores. I also was delighted to see Sara from Pocklington, and Christine and Jo from Colne, bookseller friends I have made at previous events. Thanks to Michael, Andy, Neil and all the Turnaround team who are responsible for physically getting the books out to shops around the country. Without you, I wouldn’t have the best job in the world!