Jacopo da Pontormo, whose real name was Jacopo Carucci, is today regarded as a modern artist ahead of his time. He was one of the most important and influential painters of sixteenth-century Mannerism, but also someone who anticipated the future: the works of Jacopo Pontormo would even inspire the experiments of the seventeenth century.
You may not have known it, but among the masters to whom Pontormo owed his knowledge of Florentine art, tradition even counts Leonardo da Vinci, while one of his finest pupils was Bronzino.
But why is Jacopo Pontormo so important for art history?
Let me tell you his story briefly, and then explain the importance of his art.
Let’s go!
The life of Jacopo Pontormo
Jacopo Carucci took the name Jacopo da Pontormo, as often happened, from his birthplace.
He was born in Pontorme, a village near Empoli, in 1494. His father, Bartolomeo Carucci, was a painter trained in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, though none of his works survive. Bartolomeo died in 1499 and his mother a few years later: orphaned at around ten, Jacopo was raised by his maternal grandmother.
He soon stood out as a child prodigy and was encouraged to follow in his father’s footsteps. Thanks to his talent he was able to study painting in the most important Florentine workshops: tradition, as reported by Vasari, places him in contact with Leonardo da Vinci, then with Piero di Cosimo, Mariotto Albertinelli and Fra Bartolomeo, until he became a pupil of Andrea del Sarto (from 1512), his most important master.
The biography of Jacopo Pontormo has come down to us thanks to Giorgio Vasari’s work, but also thanks to the discovery of a personal diary of his. The picture that emerges is that of a deeply melancholy artist, perhaps depressed.
Jacopo Pontormo was tormented all his life by a sense of loneliness and abandonment, probably due to his difficult childhood, and this drove him to bold pictorial experiments, breaking sharply with classicism.
His art
Jacopo Pontormo worked in Florence for the Medici family. It was at the court of one of the most important families in Europe that he produced some of his first masterpieces, such as the Portrait of Cosimo the Elder, in the Uffizi, and a Leda and the Swan that echoes a similar work by Leonardo da Vinci.
Thanks to the many workshops he frequented and the influences that shaped him, he managed to develop an individual, innovative style, contributing to the birth of Italian Mannerism.
Raphael and Michelangelo, who were his inspiration, thought he would become a great painter, but his art was largely misunderstood by his contemporaries. His figures are already fully Mannerist, crowded and charged with pathos; his colours, used in a wholly original way, are often pure and vivid, and his characters are caught in natural poses and everyday situations.
If you look at the Supper at Emmaus below, you will notice that the scene is captured like a snapshot: there is even an apostle pouring water from a jug, still unaware of the importance of the moment. He painted it in 1525 for the guesthouse of the Certosa del Galluzzo (the Florence Charterhouse), and it is now in the Uffizi.
Another work essential to understanding Pontormo’s art is the lunette with Vertumnus and Pomona (c. 1519-21), frescoed for the Medici Villa of Poggio a Caiano. It is fascinating because it shows the exact evolution of Florentine art at the time: the decoration of the hall was in fact begun by Andrea del Sarto, his master, carried on by Pontormo himself and completed many years later by Alessandro Allori, a pupil of Bronzino, who in turn had been one of Pontormo’s most promising pupils.
Pontormo, the plague and the Capponi Chapel
In 1522 the city of Florence was struck by the plague. Jacopo Pontormo took refuge at the Certosa del Galluzzo, just outside the city, together with his disciple Angelo Bronzino, and stayed there until 1527: here he frescoed an intense cycle of the Passion and painted the Supper at Emmaus. His art grew even darker and more rarefied.
To this mature phase belongs the Visitation of Carmignano (c. 1528-29), in the parish church of San Michele: four monumental figures in shot, shimmering colours, wrapped in a suspended, almost unreal atmosphere, considered one of the peaks of Mannerism.
But his absolute masterpiece is the Deposition (or Entombment of Christ, 1526-28) in the Capponi Chapel of Santa Felicita, a stone’s throw from Ponte Vecchio: a composition with no cross and no background, all built on acid pinks, blues and greens that seem to anticipate modern painting by centuries. With the earnings from these works Pontormo opened his own workshop. Vasari describes his eccentricity and paranoia like this:
“the room where he slept and sometimes worked was reached by a wooden ladder, which, once he was inside, he pulled up with a pulley so that no one could come up to him without his will or knowledge.”
The death of Jacopo Pontormo
From 1546 until his death he worked on the decoration of the choir of San Lorenzo, a vast fresco cycle later completed by Bronzino and unfortunately destroyed in 1738: only a few preparatory drawings remain. In those final years Pontormo recorded his life in the diary “Il libro mio” (“My book”), in which his hypochondria and his solitary, tormented character come through.
He noted down every day what he ate, followed fasts and talked about his work, confessing that he often shut himself away at home, pretending to be out so that no one would disturb him.
He died in Florence on 1 January 1557 and was buried in the basilica of Santissima Annunziata.
Where to see Pontormo’s works
Pontormo’s works are almost all concentrated between Florence and its surroundings:
- the Uffizi Gallery holds the Supper at Emmaus, the Portrait of Cosimo the Elder and other paintings;
- Santa Felicita (near Ponte Vecchio) has the Deposition of the Capponi Chapel, his masterpiece, in a church with free entry;
- the Medici Villa of Poggio a Caiano has the Vertumnus and Pomona lunette;
- the parish church of Carmignano, just outside Florence, keeps the Visitation.
If you are in Florence, the easiest place to start is to book priority entrance to the Uffizi: you skip the long queues and, besides Pontormo, meet Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo; then a short walk takes you to Santa Felicita for his most moving work.
And you, faced with those strikingly modern colours and those figures suspended in the void, how do you think the painting of this tormented genius would strike you?
