Adam and Eve

Traditionally attributed to Jacopo Pontormo, this unpublished canvas is a major discovery for Florentine Renaissance art. It depicts a subject not explicitly mentioned in the Bible but derived from Genesis 3, Adam and Eve at work after the Fall of Man. Eve carries a distaff for spinning fiber and Adam a hoe – attributes of labor following their expulsion by God from the Garden of Eden. The first children, Cain and Abel are present by their feet. It is a secular variant on the common Florentine devotional subject of the Virgin Mary and Joseph with the child Christ and John the Baptist. One child is typically mischievous, for the artist, and hides the lower part of his face. Pontormo treated the Creation of Eve and also the Expulsion from Paradise in a drawing in the Uffizi and a panel painting, possibly a copy, in the Uffizi. But there is no apparent connection to this painting, nor any evidence that it was part of a larger cycle. It has not been cut down at the edges either. It is an integral work. To judge by the style of the current frame and stretcher and the fact that Pontormo’s name is written in Italian, would seem to place the object in Italy, perhaps in the eighteenth century, even though the twentieth-century provenance is French.

Pontormo had venerable local precedents to update and reinterpret for this relatively uncommon subject. The earliest is a mosaic narrative from the thirteenth century on the dome of the Florentine Baptistery. An outdoor example is provided by Andrea Pisano’s stone relief on the exterior of the Campanile adjacent to Florence Cathedral, dateable to the mid-1330s, which served as a public bible for Florentines. Both precedents place Eve on the viewe r’s left and Adam on the viewer’s right, and included the attributes of the distaff and the hoe. The subject was also treated in drawings by Antonio Pollaiuolo surviving in the Uffizi, dating to around 1480, which introduces a number of New Testament symbols, unlike in this canvas. An unfinished panel by Fra Bartolomeo in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, provides a more contemporary parallel for the same subject, documented in 1512, but its commissioning history is not recorded and there is nothing in Pontormo’s painting that suggests an awareness of Fra Bartolomeo’s version. The Pontormo image has most in common with the more publicly accessible and venerable medieval models.

This remarkable object exists somewhere between a painting and a drawing. An abundant underdrawing, presumably in charcoal, is apparent in the infra-red image. Graphic lines can be detected with the naked eye, especially the contour lines of the limbs. There are clear pentimenti, notably in the position of the child at the lower left and the tool held by Adam. The dark negative background, which includes some vegetation as was appropriate for the subject, allows the figures to project and read in the round like free-standing sculptures. The work is not pure mono chrome as the painter typically let the golden priming layer show in places for economy of finish and the added glowing dramatic effect. The use of canvas mitigated against the representation of sharp details as in a panel painting, but for general breadth and a lightening touch. In that regard the work directly resembles a drawing with a briskly applied white heightening on the surface. It is not difficult to imagine a drawing of a studio assistant holding a simple wooden staff instead of the hoe as a prop.

The grisaille technique is relatively unusual in Pontormo’s oeuvre. The other surviving examples on canvas have been related to temporary festival decorations, specifically two Kress pictures deposited at Bucknell University and Bowdoin College, which happen to be very early works in a rather delicate touch.[1] The painting under consideration here was certainly intended for a collector and to be viewed close up to judge by the virtuoso handling of paint, with liquid, translucent touches. In addition to being the most expedient way to simulate reality, the grisaille technique evokes antiquity.[2] Monochrome was typically employed for Old Testament and secular subjects, as well as pure ornament, often in wall painting, and so had overtly pagan, or exotic overtones. Pliny the Elder attested that the earliest painters worked in a monochrome technique, thus also lending it the imprimatur of antiquity and even a primitiveness that must have been judged in Pontormo’s day, paradoxically, as progressive. This has particular relevance in the context of a subject taken from Genesis. Leon Battista Alberti reinforced this in citing an ancient painter named Aglaophon who used only black and white in his work. Leonardo’s comment in his notebooks that painting as a science derives from the contrast of shadow and light is not explicit praise for monochrome painting, but nonetheless signals a theoretical justification for the disciplined nature of this approach, suggesting that the primary goal of a painter was to create a three-dimensional body on a flat surface. The sheer force of the technique also had moral connotations in treating distant subjects with powerful messages, retrieving past Roman glory for contemporary Florence. It is worth recalling too that Piero di Cosimo’s violent Early Man paintings, now in the Metropolitan Museum, while not true grisaille, generally depend on a dark palette, evocative of the beginning of history on earth.

The particularly free monochrome technique and concentration on the active nude form evokes the “cartoon” culture present in Florence in this period, following the remarkable temporary display of Leonardo’s drawn cartoon featuring Saint Anne at Ssa. Annunziata in 1501.[3] Some of Leonardo’s drawings for the Battle of Anghiari were visible for a time in rooms at the church Santa Maria Novella but rather quickly dispersed. Similarly, Michelangelo’s cartoon for the Battle of Cascina was stored in the Palazzo Medici and shred into pieces within a decade of its making. The young Pontormo could have seen the remnants of both seminal designs for the birth of a new style in Florence. Conversely, Pontormo’s work was created prior to the exposure in Florence of Perino del Vaga’s Moses parting the Red Sea, now in the Brera, and thus supplies an important, entirely unexpected precedent for that controversial painting dateable to 1522.[4] It was painted astonishingly in a single day, according to Vasari, for the sacristan at the church of San Lorenzo, Raffaello di Sandro. It is telling that when Perino demonstrated the latest Roman style in Florence, he chose an Old Testament narrative painted in grisaille and on a portable canvas, as Pontormo did here. In both examples, monochrome on canvas was selected to represent the most progressive tendencies in Central Italian art in the wake of Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s examples.

This painting is not documented by any sources, nor is it mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in his perhaps surprisingly prejudiced Life of Pontormo published in 1568.[5] Pontormo’s anti-social personality and corresponding lack of interest in travel or the court were severe faults in Vasari’s mind, not to mention his gradual inability to complete work. The circumstances of its production must be speculated upon from the work itself. It was presumably made for a commission and not as preparatory for another painting (the preparatory oil sketch was not yet common studio practice of Italian artists). The use of canvas provides some avenues to explore as though it was a relatively rare support in Florentine art compared to panel, it was not entirely uncommon.

The possibility can be first excluded that it was made, like the Kress pictures presumably, as a temporary public decoration due to the self-conscious finish and that the fact that the canvas is of a tight, plain weave. The choice of canvas could indicate ease of transport of the object to a specific location, if not necessarily a specific setting, for a destination beyond Florence. Pontormo painted an altarpiece on canvas for the Carthusian Certosa di Galluzzo, now in the Uffizi, tellingly a location outside of the city, but this new work is unlikely to have been made for a church. Canvas paintings by Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo and others, featuring mythological subjects are the best known examples for private domestic use in villas. Perhaps Pontormo’s canvas was intended for such a rural setting in an aristocratic villa, given its stress on the original source for domestic labor, nudity and partial levity of interpretation.

Yet the Old Testament subject, canvas support and the characteristically Florentine formal concentration on the male nude allow one to speculate even further as to whether the painting was intended for export as a luxury good from Florence to the international market, especially the courts of England or France. Florentine agents were aware of the importance of art for feeding European diplomacy. If true, Pontormo’s painting would again anticipate the circumstances of another major canvas: Rosso Fiorentino’s Moses defending the Daughters of Jethro, now in the Uffizi, which was apparently sent to Francis I.[6] A Pontormo painting of the Raising of Lazarus was later dispatched to the French king, around 1529-30, in the same period.[7] It is notable that the Borgherini bed panels were a particular target of the local agents attempting to please the French court, in a dramatic anecdote published by Giorgio Vasari. Although he never travelled far from Florence, Pontormo’s work was of international interest.

The design of Pontormo’s painting is distinguished by the rotational, nearly completely nude figures in active motion. The subject is in part an excuse for the artist’s formal display to portray nude figures, especially the male nude, as well as to introduce some sensuality into the representation. Eve’s smile recalling both Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto as an inspired detail, and outward gaze invite the spectator into the image. The seated Eve is herself clearly studied from a male model to judge her exaggerated musculature. The composition is unusually imbalanced, almost extemporizing. The Old Testament, like mythologies, allowed for this unconventional liberty, compared to the New Testament with more prescribed modes of illustration, which is also why they were appear decorating private locations.

Although an early date has been proposed for the painting by Falciani and Costamagna, it seems rather not a juvenile work but likely produced around 1518. It can be dated then in relation to the Pucci altarpiece in the church of Santa

Maria Visdomini in Florence, dated 1518.[8] The face of Eve recalls that of the Virgin Mary, and even the odd forcefully directional movements of all the figures are comparable. Similarly, the attenuated nude forms recall the living statues on columns in the last Borgherini Bed panel, Joseph with Jacob in Egypt, now in the National Gallery, London, also dateable to 1518. Parallels can be found in drawings of this general period, such as the Saint Cecilia in the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, who resembles Eve in the facial features and partially in pose.[9]

The work is a major survival, not just because it is by one of the greatest of all Florentine artists, the final local exponent of Michelangelo in painting, but because of the unusual subject matter, support and technique. It is a further reminder that art history cannot only be studied from public paintings, but from these private efforts, where the artist was more at liberty to showcase technical strengths as a painter and ingenuity as a designer.

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