Pontormo

An early fresco in the cloister of the Annunziata in Florence still shows his attachment to del Sarto, but his brilliant Joseph in Egypt (National Gallery, London) breaks many of the rules of High Renaissance equilibrium. A staircase, like those in Piranesi’s eighteenth-century prints of prisons, leads nowhere, while the packed crowd below and gesticulating statues introduce a restlessness perhaps typical of that uneasy age. In the Visitation at Carmignano of ten years later, the monumental figures are partially deconstructed by draperies which have a life of their own and the intense and unnerving stares of the women plausibly reflect the artist’s melancholy and depressed personality. Painted roughly at the same time his masterpiece, the Deposition in San Felicita Florence, is his most hallucinatory and surreal work. The colors have a pale, unearthly iridescence and the figures float in a dream-like vacuum as Christ’s body is lowered into the tomb. In the Certosa del Galluzzo outside Florence his fresco of Vertumnus and Pomona is quite different and harks back to the carefree Arcadia of Horace and Virgil. Its incisive and witty draftsmanship may reflect a study of the prints of Dürer (1471–1528). Pontormo was a virtuoso draftsman and his last series of frescos for the basilica of San Lorenzo are only known from drawings. They were much influenced by Michelangelo’s (1475–1564) Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel but criticized by his biographer Vasari, as muddled and incoherent.

Pontormo produced many strong portraits of which the most famous today is the Halberdier in the Getty museum, sold for a record price at auction in 1989. The sitter is thought to be either the Medici Duke Cosimo I in adolescence, or Francesco Guardi, a Florentine landowner whose portrait in military costume by Pontormo is mentioned by Vasari. Whatever the case, his fashionable outfit looks very paramilitary and he fits the profile of the young Florentine gentlemen one can imagine swaggering about town during the Siege of 1530.