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.