The First Edition of The Iliad Was Published In Florence

a 3/4 portrait of a moody young white man with thin features, seated and dressed in puffy black, 16th century florence-style, with his finger in one book and his hand resting on another, in a palazzo which recedes into the background toward a classical style sculpture of david, by bronzino
Agnolo di Cosimo, aka Bronzino, Portrait of Ugolino Martelli, 1536-7, oil on panel, 102 x 85 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin via

I swear I saw someone posting Bronzino’s portrait of Ugolino Martelli on Bluesky this morning, and then posting about how the book on the table is The Iliad, in Greek, and how it’s open to Book IX, The Embassy of Achilles.

a film still from the 2015 film the boy next door in which a white-coded teenager in a blue and white striped shirt hands a sun-dappled book with an ornate cover that reads the iliad to a white coded slightly older lade in a white off the shoulder sweater and thick glasses because she's an english teacher, but both of the actors are actually latinx: ryan guzman and jennifer lopez

But after the flash of enlightenment that followed, and the wave of recognition crashed over me, and the swell of JLo redemption began to lift me up, by the time I switched tabs and actually found the scene in the 2015 thriller The Boy Next Door, where murderous stalker orphan high school student Ryan Guzman gives next door neighbor single mom one-night stand high school English teacher Jennifer Lopez a first edition of The Iliad that he bought at a garage sale for a dollar, the scroll had reloaded, the Bluesky posts had vanished, and no amount of searching could retrieve them.

jennifer lopez sits in a sunny book nook in her craftsman bungalow with books on the shelf behind her, her hair back in a casual ponytail or something, with some bangs falling forward, she wears a white off the shoulder sweater/sweatshirt as she thumbs through a book with astonishment because it is a first edition of the iliad which, is an unnecessary detail in this 2015 movie, the boy next door

And so I was like, great, now *I* have to be the guy to host this on *my* platform. But as I tried to screenshot it, the scene crumbled before my eyes. Because actually, there is no shot of Guzman/Iliad/JLo, or even Guzman/Iliad, just out-of-frame books or disembodied hands. Was it a problem with the prop? The coverage? Is that even Guzman’s hand in those reshoots? Is that even JLo?

actor ryan guzman still a couple of years from playing a baseball-playing stoner for richard linklater or a queerbaiting fireman in 911, is in a sunroom in a blue shirt and young slightly creepy face, handing an old timey book to j lo, whose bare shoulder dominates the center of the shot in the 2015 film the boy next door

The more I looked, the more I knew, the stupider I became. And NOW I began to worry, and to trace backwards, and to wonder, where the madness started to creep in? Was it at the very beginning? Was it when I saw a bound copy of The Iliad and thought, huh, what’s the deal with that?

It feels like I’ve fallen into Foucault’s Pendulum, and the undiscovered truth we all mocked so smugly since 2015, that JLo was right, was, for those with eyes to see, sitting there all along. The Iliad turns out to have been first published in Florence, Martelli’s home, in a year I cannot, for entirely other reasons, bring myself to mention on this internet, but suffice it to say our Ugolino’s grandfather Luigi d’Ugolino Martelli, who bought that sculpture of David, might have gone to the Iliad book launch party at the Medicis’.