Art, Power, and Queerness in Renaissance Florence: A Conversation with Phil Melanson
Phil Melanson's path to historical fiction began with a sense of frustration. His debut novel, Florenzer, released on June 10, 2025, started life as a screenplay, "expensive period dramas" being, as he puts it, hardly what Los Angeles wanted from "a twenty-something from New Hampshire." Years later, returning to 15th-century Florence as a novelist, he discovered what his original script had been missing: "the lifeforce of the time period, by which I mean its art."
The resulting novel follows three figures, Lorenzo de' Medici, Archbishop Francesco Salviati, and a young Leonardo da Vinci, through a Florence where banking rivalries, papal decrees, and artistic commissions form the architecture of power. For Melanson, who began his creative life in screenwriting and film marketing, the turn to fiction offered something cinema couldn't: access to interiority, to the space between public performance and private thought.
That shift from external to internal reflects Florenzer's broader project. Where much Renaissance fiction trades in spectacle and grandeur, Melanson is more interested in examining the mechanisms beneath Florence's celebrated beauty. His research process, which involved multiple trips to Florence's state archives and extended work at the British Library, aimed not just at historical accuracy but also at what he calls "historical fidelity," including an acknowledgment of those who have been excluded from dominant narratives.
"The sodomy laws are the fulcrum of the novel," he explains, "not just on the level of the narrative, but also in understanding Florence during the Renaissance." Drawing on sources like Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships, Melanson uses Leonardo's story to explore how a city that celebrated artistic beauty simultaneously criminalized bodily desire. The novel's title itself emerged from this tension prompted, he says, by Pope Francis's use of a gay slur in news coverage, which led him to consider how Florenzer "could speak to the Florentine identity so central to the novel while also illuminating the city's historic association with so-called sodomites."
This approach to historical gaps, what Melanson calls a "historiographical process," drives much of the novel's structure. His choice of three protagonists wasn't arbitrary: "Without the banker, the priest, and the artist, a story about Renaissance Florence would feel partial. A Künstlerroman in this era needs the consideration of commissions and economic power, and it needs to understand the religious context in which these works were being made."
Such methodological rigor might suggest dry academicism, but Melanson's background in visual storytelling serves him well. "I see, in my head, through the character's eyes, what I'm trying to articulate in words," he says, describing how his screenwriting experience proved useful for "rather complicated but necessary scenes like a council vote or a debate over benefices."
The novel's focus on Leonardo, rather than more steadily productive contemporaries like Botticelli, stems from what Melanson sees as permission within historical uncertainty. "It was the number of these lacunae, and especially how his early career pales in comparison to his peers that led me to center the narrative on Leonardo rather than a more steadily-working contemporary," he explains. "With Leonardo, there were more questions that we lack the facts-based answers to."
This attention to failure and incompletion extends beyond individual characters to Melanson's broader understanding of Renaissance politics. He sees power in this period as "a theater of spectacle, wealth, and control," but also recognizes how artistic patronage created its own forms of influence, what he terms "soft power." The result is a Florence where allegiances shift constantly, and legacy remains perpetually contested.
Such revisionist impulses have generated some resistance. Some early readers, Melanson notes, "accuse me of violating some version of Leonardo that they carry in their heads as universally true and sacrosanct." He finds this reaction "quite humorous, given the obvious truth that none of us alive today were in the bottega with him," a response that reflects both his scholarly confidence and his recognition that historical fiction must necessarily fill gaps that pure scholarship cannot.
Melanson positions his work within a tradition of historical novelists, citing Hilary Mantel and John Steinbeck as key influences, who use individual stories to illuminate larger cultural questions. Like Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, Florenzer employs multiple perspectives to examine the gaps in recorded history. The novel joins recent works by authors such as Sarah Waters, Lauren Groff, and Tom Crewe in utilizing historical settings to center queer narratives.
Florenzer achieves a notable balance between these various ambitions—historical fidelity, narrative complexity, and contemporary relevance. The novel's success lies in how Melanson weaves together his meticulous research with genuine literary craft, creating a Florence that feels both historically grounded and dramatically alive. His next projects suggest an author building on this foundation: one historical novel set forty years after Florenzer's events, another in the present day. His debut offers readers a Florence where art and politics intertwine in ways that illuminate both Renaissance power structures and our contemporary understanding of how beauty and brutality coexist in the making of cultural legacy.
Readers interested in following Phil Melanson can find him on his website and Instagram.
Phil Melanson is a graduate of New York University and the University of Warwick. A former movie marketer for Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures, he now lectures in film and television for Boston University. He lives in London. Florenzer is his first novel.
What a title for a book! Look forward to reading this one