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PONTORMO
Italian
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Pontormo
(1494 - 1556) |
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Pontormo.
Florentine painter (original name Jacopo
Carrucci), who broke away from High Renaissance classicism to create a
more personal, expressive style that is sometimes classified as early
Mannerism.
Pontormo was the son of Bartolommeo Carrucci, a painter. According to
the biographer Giorgio Vasari, he was apprenticed to Leonardo da Vinci
and afterward to Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo. At the age
of 18 he entered the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, and it is this
influence that is most apparent in his early works. Pontormo was
precocious (he was praised by Michelangelo whilst still a youth) and by
the time he painted his Joseph in Egypt in about 1515 (National Gallery,
London), one of a series for Pier Francesco Borgherini, he had already
created a distinctive style - full of restless movement and
disconcertingly irrational effects of scale and space - that put him in
the vanguard of Mannerism. In 1518 he completed an altarpiece in the
Church of San Michele Visdomini, Florence, that also reflects in its
agitated - almost neurotic - emotionalism a departure from the balance
and tranquillity of the High Renaissance. |
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Pontormo was primarily a
religious painter, but he painted a number of sensitive portraits (he
was a major influence on his pupil and adopted son Bronzino) and in 1521
was employed by the Medici family to decorate their villa at Poggio a
Caiano with mythological subjects (Vertumnus and Pomona according to
Vasari, but the identification is disputed) in which an apparently
idyllic scene reveals a strong undercurrent of neurosis. In the Passion
cycle (1522-25) for the Certosa near Florence (now in poor condition),
he borrowed ideas from Albrecht Dürer, whose engravings and woodcuts
were circulating in Italy. The emotional tension apparent in his work
reaches its peak in Pontormo's masterpiece, the altarpiece of the
Entombment (c.1526-8) in the Capponi Chapel of Santa Felicità, Florence.
Painted in extraordinarily vivid colours and featuring deeply poignant
figures who seem lost in a trance of grief, this is one of the key works
of Mannerism.
Pontormo became more and more of a recluse in later life. A diary
survives from 1554 to 1557, but the important frescoes in San Lorenzo on
which he worked during the last decade of his life are now known only
from drawings (best represented in the Uffizi); in these the influence
of Michelangelo is apparent. The diary tells us much of his neurotic
character - melancholy and introspective, dismayed by the slightest
illness. Numerous drawings survive, and paintings are to be found in
various galleries in Europe and America, as well as in Florence.
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