Past the Ponte Vecchio, the first square that opens on your left is Piazza Santa Felicita. The church has an unremarkable façade, topped by the passage of the Vasari Corridor, and almost everyone walks straight past it on the way to Palazzo Pitti without knowing what is inside.
In the first chapel on the right is Pontormo’s Deposition, a panel of 313 by 192 centimetres painted between 1525 and 1528: pink and blue bodies filling the whole space, with no ground under their feet and a single cloud in the sky, one of the most radical images of the Italian Cinquecento. It costs nothing to see, and there is almost never anyone in front of it.
The only difficulty is the timetable: no official source publishes the church’s opening hours. I checked three sites that list them and they give three different times, and the site the Diocese of Florence lists for this parish no longer belongs to the parish. The only certain hours are those of Mass, which you’ll find in the practical information with the two phone numbers: call, and if you can’t get through, come in the morning.
Who is the man in the green cap looking straight at you from the right edge?
The title is wrong, and there’s no cross in the picture
What is this painting actually called? The answer explains it better than any description could.
We all call it the Deposition, and it’s the name you’ll search for. But a deposition is the scene in which Christ’s body is lowered from the cross, and in this panel there is no cross: it isn’t painted, it isn’t hinted at, it isn’t behind anyone.
For this reason many scholars call it the Carrying of Christ, which is exactly what you see: a body being carried away, joined to a lament, the moment when those present look at him and weep. And it changes what you’re actually looking at: not the end of an execution, but a procession of grief, without the place and without the instrument.
A picture with no ground, and a single cloud
Watch where the feet of the foreground figures land. They barely touch the ground, on tiptoe.
Under the two bearers in the foreground, one standing and the other crouching, the painter has painted almost nothing: a dark ground, with no floor, no rock, no grass. And behind the figures there’s no landscape, no architecture, no tomb. The bodies fill the entire panel from bottom to top, wedged together like pieces of a single block, and all that is left of space is a pale background and a single cloud, top left.
It is the exact opposite of what fifteenth-century Florence had spent a century building. Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno had devoted their careers to placing figures inside a measurable space; Pontormo erases it and piles the bodies on top of one another, in a chain that spirals upward. Twenty years after the Doni Tondo, Florentine painting had stopped believing in the floor.
The colours do the rest. Pinks, blues and oranges bleached until they look enamelled, with no deep shadows: the same idea of colour as Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, pushed further. Restoration identified the materials one by one, and they’re the most expensive available at the time: lead white, azurite, lapis lazuli and madder lake, bound in egg tempera.
The man watching you from the edge
There’s a figure, at the far right edge, who isn’t looking at Christ’s body: he’s looking at you. It’s Nicodemus, wrapped in an earth-coloured cloak, with a short curly beard and a green cap tied on his head.
The art historian Luciano Berti proposed recognising in that face Pontormo’s self-portrait, and the identification has since found its way into almost every reading of the panel. It is an accepted hypothesis rather than a documented fact, but it carries a precise implication: if that is the painter, then the only person in the picture who notices whoever is standing in front of the chapel is the artist himself.
Look for the green cap, at the right edge. That’s the point where the picture steps outside its own story.
The chapel is by Brunelleschi, and a grand duke demolished its dome
Whose chapel was this before the Capponi? Another family’s, and the architect was the greatest Florence had. It was commissioned around 1420 by Bartolommeo Barbadori from Filippo Brunelleschi, in the same years Brunelleschi was starting work on the dome of the Cathedral. The Capponi bought it on 22 May 1525, and Ludovico di Gino Capponi immediately commissioned the decoration from Pontormo. The wrought-iron screen bearing the family crest dates to 1722.
Then, between 1765 and 1767 the hemispherical dome by Brunelleschi was demolished and rebuilt, to make room for the prince’s viewing box along the walkway of the Vasari Corridor, which passes directly above the church. With the dome went the fresco by Pontormo that had covered it, showing God the Father and four Patriarchs.
A grand duke had himself a private box built so he could attend Mass without mixing with the congregation, and to fit it in he tore down a Brunelleschi dome and a Pontormo fresco. The Vasari Corridor, usually told as a masterpiece of political engineering, presents its bill here.
What survives, and the restoration that brought it back into focus
Three things survive from the chapel’s original decoration, all in the same small space.
On the altar is the Deposition. On the wall is an Annunciation by the same Pontormo, with the angel and the Virgin separated by the window, divided into two scenes by real space rather than by a painted frame. And there are the four tondi of the Evangelists, on which his pupil Agnolo Bronzino also worked.
The restoration began in March 2017 and finished in 2018: carried out by Daniele Rossi, funded by Kathe and John Dyson through the association Friends of Florence, and it covered the whole chapel, not just the panel. The colours you see today are the result of that work.
Warning, because it matters for your visit: during that restoration the panel left the chapel, and was shown at Palazzo Strozzi in the exhibition “Il Cinquecento a Firenze”. It could happen again, and in the case of a parish chapel there is no website that gives you notice. It’s one more reason to phone before crossing Florence for this painting.
Practical information
Facts checked on 10 September 2026 on the official yearbook of the Diocese of Florence and the website of the Vicariate of Porta Romana. Hours and phone numbers change: check again before you go.
Where it is. The church is in Piazza Santa Felicita 3, two minutes from the Ponte Vecchio heading toward Palazzo Pitti. The Capponi Chapel is the first on the right as you enter, and is viewed from outside its screen.
Tickets. There aren’t any: admission is free. It’s a parish church, not a museum, and leaving a donation for its upkeep is the right thing to do.
Hours. Warning: the parish does not publish opening hours, and the unofficial sources in circulation give three different versions. I won’t print a number I can’t verify. The only certain hours are those of Mass: Monday to Thursday at 18:00, Saturday vigil at 18:00, Sunday at 11:00.
When not to go. During Mass the chapel can’t be visited, since it is the first one on the right as you enter, right among the congregation. The safest time is a weekday morning, before midday.
Contacts. The two official yearbooks publish two different numbers, so here are both: the Vicariate of Porta Romana gives 055 213018, the diocesan yearbook gives 055 7964791. The email address is felicita@parrocchie.diocesifirenze.it.
Light. By day the chapel gets its light from a single window, and the painting sits behind a screen. The best time is a clear morning.
How much time it takes. A quarter of an hour for the Deposition. Half an hour if you also stop for the Annunciation and the four tondi, which are in the same chapel and which almost everyone overlooks.
What to see nearby
Santa Felicita is the first thing you meet in the Oltrarno coming from the centre, and from here it’s five minutes to Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens, ten to the Brancacci Chapel, where Masaccio does exactly the opposite of what Pontormo does here, and a half-hour climb to San Miniato al Monte.
Of Pontormo at the Uffizi you can see the Supper at Emmaus, which came from the Certosa del Galluzzo, and his Medici portraits; the list of the museum’s main works is in Uffizi Gallery: masterpieces to see, and the same visit takes in Leonardo’s Annunciation and Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The painter’s life, including the diary he kept in his last years, is told in Jacopo Pontormo.
Photo credits: the façade, the chapel view and the Annunciation are by Francesco Bini (CC BY 2.5 and CC BY 3.0); the façade image has been cropped. The reproduction of the Deposition is in the public domain. All from Wikimedia Commons.
