Jacopo da Pontormo

Jacopo da Pontormo , 1494-1556, Florentine painter, one of the creators of mannerism . His real name was Jacopo Carrucci. He studied with Andrea del Sarto , Leonardo da Vinci , Mariotto Albertinelli , and Piero di Cosimo . While studying with Sarto, Pontormo met Il Rosso , who became his main rival. Among his earliest religious works were the altarpieces for the churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Annunziata, Florence. His altar for the church of San Michele Visdomini, Florence, is considered by many to be the first mannerist work in recorded history. Pontormo was also a talented portraitist; he made full use of his abilities in his Passion Cycle (1522-25) for the Florentine Certosa family, in which he gave animation and presence to several mythological scenes. His Lady with a Lap Dog is one of the first mannerist portraits. It is said that Pontormo was influenced by Michelangelo and Dürer as his work matured. For much of his life, Pontormo was a recluse. He painted several frescoes from 1546 to 1556, but these have since been lost. He is remembered mainly for his drawings from this period. Examples of his art are in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Fogg Museum, Cambridge; and the Yale Univ. Art Gallery. Pontormo also kept a diary in which he chronicled his neurotic obsessions.

Bibliography: See J. Cox-Rearick, The Drawings of Pontormo (2 vol., 1981).

Pontormo ( Jacopo Carucci) (1494–1556). Italian painter, born in the Tuscan village of Pontormo, near Empoli, and active in and around Florence. According to Vasari, he studied successively with Leonardo da Vinci, Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto, whose workshop he is said to have entered in 1512. Andrea was certainly a major influence on his early work. Pontormo was precocious (he was praised by Michelangelo whilst still a youth) and by the time he painted his Joseph in Egypt (NG, London) in about 1518 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. The emotional tension evident in this work reaches its peak in Pontormo's masterpiece, the altarpiece of the Entombment (c.1526–8) in the Capponi Chapel of S. 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 high points of Mannerism. Pontormo was primarily a religious painter, but he was also an outstanding portraitist (he was a major influence on his pupil and adopted son Bronzino) and in 1520–1 for the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano he painted a memorable mythological work (Vertumnus and Pomona according to Vasari, but the identification is disputed) in which an apparently idyllic scene reveals a strong undercurrent of neurosis. In Pontormo's later work his style was enriched by the study of Michelangelo and Dürer's prints, but this stage of his career is known mainly through his superb drawings (best represented in the Uffizi), as the great fresco scheme in S. Lorenzo, Florence, that occupied him from 1546 until his death, was destroyed in the 18th century. Pontormo's diary for part of 1554–6 remains, giving a day-to-day account of his progress. It tells us much of his neurotic character—melancholy and introspective, dismayed by the slightest illness.