Narrated by an author much like Valdés - an ardently anti-Communist Cuban exile who lives in Paris with her husband and daughter, as Valdés has done - “The Weeping Woman” interweaves present and past with intelligence and humor. But then, one can hardly fault her for not being Leonardo’s equal. The only false note is struck, inevitably, in her depiction of Lisa del Giocondo, which involves the thankless task of divining the sitter’s “secret.” Sir Kenneth Clark called the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile “a quarry so shy” it must be approached “with every artifice.” Storey’s attempt, by no means clumsy, doesn’t come off.

Her narrative instincts are strong and her dialogue sharp throughout, her exposition is adroit and informative. Tremendously entertaining and “unapologetic” in its artistic license, “Oil and Marble” will remind an older generation of the pleasures of Irving Stone’s art historical fiction, particularly his chronicle of the Sistine Chapel ceiling commission, “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Storey’s affection for the period is clear. Storey’s heroic foils are convincing, as are the cameo appearances of the pair’s famous contemporaries Sandro Botticelli, Cesare Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli. Michelangelo, more than 20 years Leonardo’s junior, is disheveled, obscure and single-minded. Leonardo, at the height of his powers, is graceful and distinguished, with unbounded insights and interests. Storey’s richly imagined tale of Leonardo and Michelangelo and their rivalry, as they conceive the Mona Lisa and the David in Florence at the turn of the 16th century, casts Vasari’s not-of-this-world paragons as men, and starkly different ones at that, as the title’s play on oil and water suggests. Everything Leonardo does “clearly comes from God rather than from human art,” while Michelangelo, who was “graciously” sent down by “the benign ruler of heaven,” is the “perfect exemplar in life, work and behavior and in every endeavor.” Celebrating perfection, as Vasari’s gossipy “Lives of the Artists” does, is one thing - dramatizing it, quite another. Giorgio Vasari didn’t stint with his praise. OIL AND MARBLE A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo By Stephanie Storey 345 pp.

Oil and Marble by Stephanie Storey