Art and power embrace in a danse macabre

SICILIAN sculptor Gaetano Zummo was a 17th-century Gunther von Hagens. His medium was wax.

SICILIAN sculptor Gaetano Zummo was a 17th-century Gunther von Hagens. His medium was wax, and his extraordinarily lifelike figures, based on surgical dissections of cadavers, helped inaugurate the modern science of anatomy.

This macabre approach also had an aesthetic and religious aspect. An abbot by training, Zummo became obsessed by disease and bodily decay. He assembled a series of polychromatic wax tableaus depicting those ravaged by syphilis or afflicted by plague. These were known as the Theatres of Death, and their preoccupation with physical degeneration make them the 1690s equivalent of Damien Hirst's animals in formaldehyde.

In Secrecy, English author Rupert Thomson inserts a beating heart into the bare skeleton of historical fact surrounding Zummo. He takes the few scattered biographical details we have, such as the sculptor's time in Florence in the service of Cosimo III de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and weaves about them a story as dark and violent as the works the wax artist produced.

Thomson's Zummo is no abbot, rather a journeyman sculptor who has been run out of his home town, Syracuse, by a scurrilous rumour put about by his older brother, an unrepentantly spiteful bloke. But, like the real man, Zummo has developed a high reputation for his wax works through the years: high enough, indeed, that the Grand Duke has invited him to Florence to commission a secret sculpture, the life-sized figure of a woman created for his eyes alone.

This is Thomson's ninth novel and first book since his extraordinary 2010 memoir This Party's Got to Stop. If he plays fast and loose with Zummo's true life, he is lavish in his devotion to the actual texture of time and place. The leather strips that serve instead of glass window-panes in Florence's buildings; the ghetto dwellings, up to 11 stories high, cantilevered like Dr Seuss constructions; peasant wine made from the dregs of crushed grapes and water; a boar's hide, complete with snout and trotters, nailed to a wall to indicate a tavern: all these details, along with countless others, are embroidered into the novel's fabric, glittering threads shot through the blackest narrative cloth.

Zummo is streetwise, partial to women and drink, kindly to the meek, diligent in his labours and haunted by the past. He carries himself with a very modern swagger but has no vanity beyond a sense of the value and power of his work. When the Grand Duke installs him in the former stables of his palace and sets him to work on a piece that will serve as a private shrine to Cosimo's former wife, Marguerite-Louise d'Orleans -- a woman the Duke adored, who loathed him with an equal passion and was eventually exiled to a nunnery -- Zummo is aware of the trust placed in him, but also of the danger that comes with it. He sets to work under the shadow of obligation to an immensely powerful man; moreover, one surrounded by a jealous and corrupt court.

Thomson traces the events that follow with a punkish energy and a Machiavellian gift for intrigue. He has a vivid sense of the squalor of the urban and of the amorality that attends political machinations in any era. Having granted Zummo enough intelligence to know that his position in the Duke's regard is tenuous, he also makes him a decent enough character that he cannot conceive of the worst of which the Florentine power players of the day are capable.

Of course there is a woman, the niece of a local apothecary whose mysterious origins are implicated in the larger forces at work. It is Zummo's growing attraction to her that brings the dispersed characters and plotlines into a final, clarifying alignment.

Beneath all this is Zummo's art, which serves as a narrative driver and a governing metaphor. His secret commission is a morbid triumph, cast from the corpse of a murdered girl. But what we learn along the way is that mimesis, the exquisite replication of surface reality, is not the whole of the Sicilian's method. Wax sculptures emerged from an earlier religious tradition: originally votive images, they have, by Zummo's day, declined into something more ambiguous, closer to voodoo dolls or fetish figures.

The sense of uncanny produced by Zummo's sculptures, their grisly origins and secretive purposes, hovers over the story like a miasma. And it is this obscure dread that raises this book above the level of finely written entertainment. Thomson's fiction often has been animated by what poet Robert Browning called the "dangerous edge of things", and in Secrecy he hones that edge to a new keenness. Think of those canvases by Caravaggio -- their marriage of the gruesome and the sublime, their superb rendering of vicious occurrence, those shafts of light that only indicate the vast darkness outside the frame -- and you will have some sense of this novel's nocturnal character and force.

Secrecy. By Rupert Thomson. Granta, $39.99

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.