Pontormo

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Jacopo Carucci (May 24, 1494 — January 2, 1557), usually known as Jacopo da Pontormo, Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo, was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine school. He was famous for his use of contorted poses, distorted perspective and peculiar, markedly unnatural colors, which appear to mirror his restless, neurotic temperament.

Biography

Jacopo Carucci was born at Pontorme, near Empoli. Vasari relates how the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy and lonely," was shuttled around as a young apprentice:

Jacopo had not been many months in Florence before Bernardo Vettori sent him to stay with Leonardo da Vinci, and then with Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and finally, in 1512, with Andrea del Sarto, with whom he did not remain long, for after he had done the cartoons for the arch of the Servites, it does not seem that Andrea bore him any good will, whatever the cause may have been.

Pontormo painted only in and around Florence, supported by Medici patronage. A foray to Rome, largely to see Michelangelo's work, influenced his later style. Haunted faces and elongated bodies are characteristic of his work. An example of Pontormo's early style is The Visitation of the Virgin and St Elizabeth, with its dancelike, balanced figures, painted from 1514 to 1516 for the parish church of St. Michele in Carmignano, a few miles from Florence. In 1519-20 Pontormo also took part in the fresco decoration of the salon of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano, not far from Florence. There he painted frescoes in a pastoral genre style, very uncommon for Florentine painters; their subject was the obscure classical myth of Vertumnus and Pomona in a lunette.

In 1522, when the plague broke out in Florence, Pontormo left for the Certosa di Galuzzo, a cloistered Carthusian monastery where the monks followed vows of silence. He painted a series of frescoes, now quite damaged, on the passion and resurrection of Christ.

Main works in Florence

The large altarpiece canvas for the Brunelleschi-designed Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, portraying The Deposition from the Cross, is considered by many his surviving masterpiece (1528). The decoration in the dome of the chapel is now lost, but four roundels with the Evangelists still adorn the pendentives, worked on by both Pontormo and Agnolo Bronzino.

The figures, with their sharply modeled forms and bright, harsh colors are united in a stark and flattened space. Those who are lowering Christ appear as anguished as the mourners. This bleak and tumultuous oval of figures took three years for Pontormo to complete. He collaborated on the rest of its decor so intimately with Bronzino, his chief pupil, that specialists dispute which roundels each of them painted.

Also by Pontormo is the Annunciation frescoed on adjacent columns, which resembles his Visitation in the church of San Francesco e Michele at Carmignano in both the style and swaying postures.

The nearby Uffizi Gallery holds his mystical Supper at Emmaus as well as portraits. Many of Pontormo's well known canvases, such as Joseph being sold to Potiphar and the Martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban Legion (c. 1531) depict crowds milling about in awkward contrapposto of greatly varied positions. His portraits, acutely characterized, show similarly Mannerist proportions.

Lost or damaged works

Many of Pontormo's works have been damaged, including the lunnettes for the cloister in the Carthusian monastery of Galluzo. Most tragic is the loss of the unfinished frescoes for the church of San Lorenzo which consumed the last decade of his life. His frescoes depicted a judgement day composed of an unsettling morass of writhing figures. The film of Giovanni Fago, Pontormo, a heretical love evokes his lonely and ultimately paranoid dedication to this project, which he often kept shielded from unlookers. The remaining drawings, showing a bizarre and mystical ribboning of bodies, had an almost hallucinatory effect. Florentine figure painting had mainly stressed linear and upright sculptural figures. Jesus in the Sistine Chapel wall is a massive painted block stern in his judgment; by contrast, Pontormo's Jesus in the Last Judgment squirms sinuously, as if rippling through the heavens in the dance of ultimate finality. Heaps of liquefied angels amass about him. In his Last Judgment Pontormo went against pictorial and theological tradition by placing God the Father at the feet of Christ, instead of above him, an idea Vasari found deeply disturbing:

But I have never been able to understand the significance of this scene, although I know that Jacopo had wit enough for himself, and also associated with learned and lettered persons; I mean, what he could have intended to signify in that part where there is Christ on high, raising the dead, and below His feet is God the Father, who is creating Adam and Eve. Besides this, in one of the corners, where are the four Evangelists, nude, with books in their hands, it does not seem to me that in a single place did he give a thought to any order of composition, or measurement, or time, or variety in the heads, or diversity in the flesh-colours, or, in a word, to any rule, proportion or law of perspective, for the whole work is full of nude figures with an order, design, invention, composition, colouring, and painting contrived after his own fashion, and with such melancholy and so little satisfaction for him who beholds the work, that I am determined, since I myself do not understand it, although I am a painter, to leave all who may see it to form their own judgement, for the reason that I believe that I would drive myself mad with it, and would bury myself alive, even as it appears to me that Jacopo in the period of eleven years that he spent upon it sought to bury himself and all who might see the painting, among all those extraordinary figures... Wherefore it appears that in this work he paid no attention to anything save certain parts, and of the other more important parts he took no account whatever. In a word, whereas he had thought in the work to surpass all the paintings in the world of art, he failed by a great measure to equal his own (past) works; whence it is evident that he who seeks to strive beyond his strength and, as it were, to force nature, ruins the good qualities with which he may have been liberally endowed by her.(1)

Critical assessment and legacy

Vasari's Life of Pontormo, depicting him as withdrawn and steeped in neurosis while at the center of the artists and patrons of his lifetime, makes a fine introduction to the artistic life of the 16th century. A diary of his last two years survives. His personality and idiosyncrasies gave Pontormo a style that few were able to imitate with the exception of Bronzino. He shares some of the mannerism of Rosso Fiorentino and of Parmigianino. In some ways he anticipated the Baroque as well as the tensions of El Greco. His eccentricities also resulted in an original sense of composition. At best, his compositions are cohesive. The figures in the Deposition, for example, appear to sustain each other: removal of any one of them would cause the edifice to collapse. In lesser works, as in the Joseph canvases, the crowding makes for a confusing pictorial melee. It is in the later drawings that we see a graceful fusion of bodies in a composition which includes the oval frame of Jesus in the Last Judgement.

Anthology of works

Early works (until 1521)

Painting	Date	Site
Leda and the Swan (uncertain attribution)	1512-1513	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Holy Conversation	1514	San Luca Chapel, Santa Annunziata, Florence.
Episode of Hospital Life	1514	Accademia, Florence
Veronica and the Image	1515	Medici Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Visitation	1514-1516	Santa Annunziata, Florence
Lady with Basket of Spindles(attributed to Andrea del Sarto)	1516-1517	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Marriage bedchamber panels for Pier Francesco Borgherini. (Two others by Francesco Bachiacca)
Joseph reveals himself to his brothers	1516-17	National Gallery, London
Joseph sold to Potiphar	1516-17	National Gallery, London
Joseph's Brothers Beg for Help	1515	National Gallery, London
Pharaoh with his Butler and Baker	1516-1517	National Gallery, London
Joseph in Egypt	1517-18	National Gallery, London
*St. Quentin (Also attributed to Giovanni Maria Pichi)	1517	Pinacoteca comunale, Sansepolcro
Portrait of Furrier	1517-1518	Louvre, Paris
Madonna with Child and Saints	1518	San Michele Visdomini, Florence
Portrait of Musician	1518-1519	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
St Anthony Abbott	1518-1519	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Portrait of Cosimo the Elder	1518-1519	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
John the Evangelist & the Archangel Gabriel	1519	Church of S. Michele, Empoli
Adoration of the Magi	1519-21	Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Vertumnus and Pomona	1519-1521	Villa Medici, Poggio a Caiano
Study of Man's Head (Drawing)		Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

(1522-1530)

Painting	Date	Site
Mary and Child with Four saints	1520-30	Metropolitan Museum, New York City
Portrait of two friends	c. 1522	Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice
Madonna with Child & Two Saints (Bronzino?)	c. 1522	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Holy Family with St John	1522-1524	Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Holy Family with St John	1522-1524	Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Madonna with Child & St John {Attributed to Rosso Fiorentino)	1523-1525	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Prayer in Gesthemane (copies by Jacopo da Empoli)	1523-1525	Certosa di Galluzo
Walk to Calvary	1523-1525	Certosa di Galluzo
Christ before Pilate	1523-1525	Certosa di Galluzo
Deposition	1523-1525	Certosa di Galluzo
Resurrection	1523-1525	Certosa di Galluzo
Supper in Emmaus	1525	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Study of a Carthusian Monk (Drawing)	1525	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Madonna and child & two angels	1525	San Francisco Museum Art, San Francisco
Portrait of young man in pink	1525-1526,	Pinacoteca Communale, Lucca.
Tabernacle of San Giuliano, Boldrone, Crucifix with Madonna & St. John, and Sant'Agostino	1525-1526:	Accademia, Florence
Birth of St. John Baptist	1526	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Saint Jerome Penitent	1526-1527	Landesmuseum, Hannover.
Madonna with Child & St John (Bronzino?)	1526-1528	Palazzo Corsini, Florence.
Madonna with Child & St John	1527-1528.	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Matthew, Luke, & John (Mark painted by Bronzino)	1525-1526	Santa Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence.
Deposition	1526-1528	Santa Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence.
Annunciation	1527-1528	Santa Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence.
Portrait of Francesca Capponi, as St. Mary Magdalen	1527-1528	Whitfield Fine Art, London.
Visitation	1528-1529	Church of San Francesco e Michele, Carmignano
Madonna with Child, Saint Anne and Four saints	1528-1529	Louvre Museum, Paris.
Eleven Thousand Martyrs	1529-1530	Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Mature works (after 1530)

Painting	Date	Site
Martyrdom of San Maurizio and the Theban Legions (Pontormo & Bronzino)	1531	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Noli me Tangere (Bronzino?)	1531	Casa Buonarroti, Florence
Portrait of lady in red with puppy, (Bronzino?)	1532-1533	Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt
Venus and Cupid	1532-1534	Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence
Portrait of Alessandro de' Medici	c. 1534-1535	Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Portrait of Alessandro de' Medici	c. 1534-1535	Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Adam and Eve	1535	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Study for the Three Graces (Drawing)	1535	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Portrait of Halberdier	1537	Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Portrait of Niccolò Ardinghelli		National Gallery, Washington D.C.
Portrait of Maria Salviati	1543-1545	Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Sacrificial Scene	c. 1545	Capodimonte Museum, Naples
My Book (Pontormo's Diary)	1554-1556	National Library, Florence
Portrait of Pontormo (Bronzino)
St. Francis (Drawing)		Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
San Lorenzo (Fresco cartoons)

External links

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