Pontormo: The Complete Story
Pontormo was the most nervous genius of the Florentine Renaissance, the man who painted grief in pink and sky blue. Born Jacopo Carucci in 1494, trained by Andrea del Sarto, he made the strangest great altarpiece of the sixteenth century and kept a diary as unsettling as his art.
His figures float, his colours come from nowhere in nature, and his private life was a locked room with a ladder pulled up. All of it is in the pictures.
Pontormo at a glance:
1494: born Jacopo Carucci in Pontorme, near Empoli; orphaned young and shuttled between guardians.
1512 or so: enters Andrea del Sarto's shop, alongside the future rival Rosso Fiorentino.
1521: frescoes Vertumnus and Pomona at the Medici villa of Poggio a Caiano, the sunniest wall of his life.
1528: finishes the Deposition in Santa Felicita, figures grieving in mid-air on rose and ice blue.
1557: dies with the San Lorenzo choir unfinished; his pupil Bronzino completes the walls and buries him.
Del Sarto's restless pupil
Orphaned young, Jacopo came from the village of Pontorme near Empoli, and Florence renamed him after it.
He passed briefly through several workshops, Leonardo's among them by Vasari's account, before settling under Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter.
Michelangelo saw an early fresco and predicted the boy would carry art to the skies. Instead, Pontormo bent it sideways, which proved more interesting.
The plague years at the Certosa
Fleeing plague in 1523, he spent two years frescoing the Certosa monastery outside Florence and made a scandalous choice: he based his compositions on German prints by Durer. Borrowing northern angularity into the city of disegno struck Vasari as a betrayal, and the criticism has followed Pontormo ever since, proof mostly that he was the rare Florentine looking beyond Florence.
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The Deposition, grief without ground
Around 1525 to 1528, in the Capponi Chapel of Santa Felicita, he painted his defining work: Christ carried from the cross by figures in rose, salmon and powder blue, no cross, no ground, no weight, only bodies and grief suspended in colour. It ignores every rule his teachers taught and has hypnotised painters for five centuries; the Visitation he painted at Carmignano soon after, four women swelling like sails, has the same floating logic.
The myth: the unstable minor master
Because Vasari painted him as a solitary eccentric, Pontormo is filed as Mannerism's neurotic footnote.
The counter evidence is the work: the Medici trusted him for decades, from the Poggio a Caiano lunette of 1521 to the San Lorenzo choir he painted for his last eleven years, frescoes so radical that the church destroyed them in 1738, one of art history's great losses.
The strangeness was not weakness. It was a style Florence needed two more centuries to digest.
Where to see Pontormo
The Capponi Chapel Deposition is in Santa Felicita, steps from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence; the Visitation is in the parish church of Carmignano; the Uffizi holds his portraits and the Poggio a Caiano villa his sunniest fresco. He died in Florence at the end of 1556, still working on San Lorenzo, and was buried by his pupil Bronzino.
The lunette that acts like summer
In 1520 the Medici sent him to their villa at Poggio a Caiano to fresco a lunette wrapped around a round window. He filled it with Vertumnus and Pomona: garden gods on a wall, boys dangling from branches, a dog.
Nothing else in Florence looks like it. It is light, slack and sunlit, as close as Renaissance fresco ever came to a lazy afternoon.
Pope Leo X died in 1521 and the commission stopped, leaving one perfect wall and an unfinished room.
The chalk engine
The Uffizi keeps hundreds of his red and black chalk drawings, and they are where his modern reputation was rebuilt. The studies twist and hover exactly like the paintings, only faster.
For the doomed San Lorenzo frescoes he drew tangles of nudes tumbling through flood and resurrection. The drawings survive; the walls were destroyed in the 18th century.
Michelangelo rated him. When the old man wanted two of his own cartoons turned into paintings, the Noli me tangere and a Venus, he handed them to Pontormo.
Bronzino, the almost-son
The orphaned apprentice Agnolo Bronzino entered the shop as a boy and never really left. Pontormo painted him into the Joseph panels, a child sitting on a step.
Bronzino became the polished court painter his master refused to be, but the loyalty ran both ways for forty years.
The diary records their suppers. When Pontormo died in the middle of San Lorenzo, it was Bronzino who finished the choir and saw him buried.
The Pontormo questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? The floating, acid coloured Deposition of Santa Felicita and Florentine Mannerism at its strangest.
Who taught him? Andrea del Sarto, after passages through other Florentine shops.
What happened to his last frescoes? The San Lorenzo choir cycle was destroyed in 1738; only drawings survive.
When did he die? At the end of 1556 in Florence, about 62, mid project.
What does the diary actually say? Bread, eggs, fish roe, aching kidneys, which figure he finished that day, and whether Bronzino came to supper. Three years of it survive in the National Library in Florence.
How much is a Pontormo worth? Nearly everything is locked in churches and museums. When his Halberdier reached auction in 1989, the Getty paid 35.2 million dollars, then a record for any Old Master.
More secrets to unlock
The ladder he pulled up behind him
For his last three years Pontormo kept a diary, and it survives: what he ate (bread, eggs, the occasional splurge), what he painted that day, his aches, the weather, who annoyed him. It is the most intimate document any Renaissance painter left, written by a man who lived in a room reached by a ladder he could pull up behind him.
