Pontormo (1494-1557)
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Jacopo Carucci, 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.
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. 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 specialist’s 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.
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 judgment 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 onlookers. 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:
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 Judgment
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