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This approach is especially helpful in framing the lives and choices of people like Frederick the Great and notorious Italian Renaissance satirist and blackmailer Pietro Aretino, well before the idea of gayness as an identity existed.

The influential Venetian writer Pietro Aretino wrote in 1546: “Shame on you, our century, for tolerating that even tailors and butchers appear to be living in painting.”

In fact, it was a speck from the lower-right quarter of Spinello Aretino’s “St. Mary Magdalen Holding a Crucifix,” one of the Met’s fourteenth-century religious masterpieces.

Angela pointed out that, now that the service had begun, they weren’t supposed to go down these steps, but Ken insisted—he didn’t want to miss the Spinello Aretino frescoes in the sacristy.

After a sensationalistic opening — Could there be a lost Leonardo behind a Vasari fresco? — the book does settle down, but many points are tediously repeated: Once we’re told that “Uccello” means “bird” or that pornographer Pietro Aretino died laughing at a dirty joke, we don’t need to be told again, let alone three times, as we are the anecdote about the young Leonardo depicting an angel so beautifully that his teacher Verrocchio gave up painting and decided to stick with sculpture.