Pontormo

Infobox Artist
bgcolour =
name = Pontormo


imagesize = 200px
caption = Portrait of Pontormo from an edition of Giorgio Vasari's "Vite".
birthname = Jacopo Carucci
birthdate = birth date|1494|5|24|mf=y
location = Pontormo, Italy
deathdate = death date and age|1557|1|2|1494|5|24|mf=y
deathplace = Florence, Italy
nationality = Italian
field = Painting
training = Leonardo da Vinci, Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto
movement = Mannerism
works =
patrons =
awards =

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. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.

Biography and Early Work

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:

cquote|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 in and around Florence, often 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 (at left).

This early "Visitation" makes an interesting comparison with his painting of the same subject (at right), which was done about a decade later for the parish church of St. Michael in Carmignano, a few miles from Florence. Placing these two pictures together—one from his early style, and another from his mature period—throws Pontormo's artistic development into sharp relief. In the earlier work, Pontormo is much closer in style to his teacher, Andrea del Sarto, and to the early sixteenth century renaissance artistic principles. For example, the figures stand at just under half the height of the overall picture, and though a bit more crowded than true high renaissance balance would prefer, at least are placed in a classicizing architectural setting at a comfortable distance from the viewer. In the later work, the viewer is brought almost uncomfortably close to the Virgin and St. Elizabeth, who drift toward each other in clouds of drapery. Moreover, the clear architectural setting that is carefully constructed in earlier piece has been completely abandoned in favor of a peculiar nondescript urban setting.

The Joseph canvases (now in the National Gallery in London) offer another example of Pontormo's developing style. Done around the same time as the earlier "Visitation", these works (such as "Joseph in Egypt", at left) show a much more mannerist leaning.

In the years between the SS Annunziata and San Michele "Visitation"s, Pontormo took part in the fresco decoration of the salon of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano (1519-20), 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 Pontormo's surviving masterpiece (1528).

The figures, with their sharply modeled forms and brilliant colors are united in an enormously complex, swirling ovular composition, housed by a shallow, somewhat flattened space. Although commonly known as "The Deposition from the Cross", there is no actual cross in the picture, making the subject matter of this painting is as uncertain as the space in which it takes place. The scene might more properly be called a "Lamentation" or "Bearing the Body of Christ". Those who are lowering (or supporting) Christ appear as anguished as the mourners. Though they are bearing the weight of a full-grown man, they barely seem to be touching the ground; the lower figure in particular balances delicately and implausibly on his front two toes. These two boys have sometimes been interpreted as Angels, carrying Christ in his journey to Heaven. In this case, the subject of the picture would be more akin to an "Entombment", though the lack of any discernible tomb disrupts that theory, just as the lack of cross poses a problem for the "Deposition" interpretation. Finally, it has also been noted that the positions of Christ and the Virgin seem to echo those of Michelangelo's "Pietà" in Rome, though here in the "Deposition" mother and son have been separated. Thus in addition to elements of a "Lamentation" and "Entombment", this picture carries hints of a "Pietà". [One attempt at defining "mannerist" art is to characterize it as art that follows art rather than art that follows nature, or life. [See for example Sydney Freedberg's notion of the 'quoted' form in "Observations on the Painting of the Maniera" "Art Bulletin" 47 (1965), pp. 187–97.] Though Freedberg did not classify Pontormo as a strictly "maniera" painter, if we accept that the "Deposition" does hold a quotation from Michelangelo's "Pietà", then perhaps we can understand better how Pontormo fits in as a "mannerist" and into his own larger history of sixteenth century art.] It has been speculated that the bearded figure in the background at the far right is a self-portrait of Pontormo as Joseph of Arimathea. Another unique feature of this particular "Deposition" is the empty space occupying the central pictorial plane as all the Biblical personages seem to fall back from this point. It has been suggested that this emptiness may be a physical representation of the Virgin Mary's emotional emptiness at the prospect of losing her son.

On the wall to the right of the "Deposition", Pontormo frescoed an "Annunciation" scene (at right). As with the "Deposition", the artist's primary attention is on the figures themselves rather than their setting. Placed against white walls, the Angel Gabriel and Virgin Mary are presented in an environment that is so simplified as to almost seem stark. The fictive architectural details above each of them, are painted to resemble the gray stone "pietra serena" that adorns the interior of Santa Felicità, thus uniting their painted space with the viewer's actual space. The startling contrast between the figures and ground makes their brilliant garments almost seem to glow in the light of the window between them, against the stripped-down background, as if the couple miraculously appeared in an extension of the chapel wall. The "Annunciation" resembles his above mentioned "Visitation" in the church of San Michele at Carmignano in both the style and swaying postures.

Vasari tells us that the cupola was originally painted with God the Father and Four Patriarchs. 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 his chief pupil Agnolo Bronzino. The two artists collaborated so intimately, that specialists dispute which roundels each of them painted.

This tumultuous oval of figures took three years for Pontormo to complete. According to Vasari, because Pontormo desired above all to "do things his own way without being bothered by anyone," the artist screened off the chapel so as to prevent interfering opinions. Vasari continues, "And so, having painted it in his own way without any of his friends being able to point anything out to him, it was finally uncovered and seen with astonishment by all of Florence..." [Giorgio Vasari, "The Lives of the Artists", tr. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 409]

A number of Pontormo's other works have also remained in Florence; the Uffizi Gallery holds his mystical "Supper at Emmaus" as well as portraits.

Many of Pontormo's well known canvases, such as the early "Joseph in Egypt" series (c. 1515) and the later "Martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban Legion" (c. 1531) depict crowds milling about in extreme 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 (at left).

Perhaps 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 last judgement day composed of an unsettling morass of writhing figures. The remaining drawings, showing a bizarre and mystical ribboning of bodies, had an almost hallucinatory effect. Florentine figure painting had mainly stressed linear and sculptural figures. For example, the Christ in Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel is a massive painted block, stern in his wrath; by contrast, Pontormo's Jesus in the "Last Judgment" twists sinuously, as if rippling through the heavens in the dance of ultimate finality. Angels swirl about him in even more serpentine poses. If Pontormo's work from the 1520s seemed to float an a world little touched by gravitational force, the "Last Judgment" figures seem to have escaped it altogether and fly through a rarefied air.

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:

Critical assessment and legacy

Vasari's "Life" of Pontormo, depicts him as withdrawn and steeped in neurosis while at the center of the artists and patrons of his lifetime. This image of Pontormo has tended to color the popular conception of the artist, as seen in the film of Giovanni Fago, "Pontormo, a heretical love". Fago portrays Pontormo as mired in a lonely and ultimately paranoid dedication to his final "Last Judgment" project, which he often kept shielded from onlookers. Yet as the art historian Elizabeth Pilliod has pointed out, Vasari was in fierce competition with the Pontormo/Bronzino workshop at the time when he was writing his "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects". This professional rivalry between the two "bottega"s could well have have provided Vasari with ample motivation for running down the artistic lineage of his opponent for Medici patronage. [See "An Introduction to Vasari's Story" in "Pontormo, Bronzino, and Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art" (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).]

Perhaps as a result of Vasari's derision, or perhaps because of the vagaries of aesthetic taste, Potormo's work was quite out of fashion for several centuries. The fact that so much of his work has been lost or severely damaged is testament to this neglect, though he has received renewed attention by contemporary art historians. Indeed, between 1989 and 2002, Pontormo's "Portrait of a Halberdier" (at right), held the title of the world's most expensive painting by an Old Master.

Regardless as to the veracity of Vasari's account, it is certainly true that Pontormo's artistic idiosyncrasies produced a style that few were able (or willing) to imitate, with the exception of his closest pupil Bronzino. Bronzino's early work is so close to that of his teacher, that the authorship of several paintings from the 1520s and '30s are still under dispute—for example the four "tondi" containing the evangelists in the Capponi Chapel, and the "Portrait of a Lady in Red" now in Frankfurt (at left).

Pontormo 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 other 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".

References

Anthology of works

Early works (until 1521)

External links

* [http://www.galleryofart.us/Pontormo/ Pontormo at Gallery of Art]
* [http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/p/pontormo/ Pontormo's paintings and drawings illustrated]
* [http://www.artist-biography.info/artist/jacopo_da_fontormo/ Giorgio Vasari's "Vita"] (English)
* [http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/pontormo_index.html/ Pontormo's 1554 diary]
* [http://www-class.unl.edu/ahis498b/parts/week5/Ponty.html| Frescoes at San Lorenzo]
* A diary of his last two years survives [http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/pontormosdiary.php]