Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Jacopo Carrucci, called Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1557)

Pontormo
Annunciatory Angel
(Capponi Annunciation)
ca. 1526-28
fresco
Chiesa di Santa Felicità, Florence

Pontormo
Virgin Annunciate
(Capponi Annunciation)
ca. 1526-28
fresco
Chiesa di Santa Felicità, Florence

Pontormo
Virgin and Child with Five Saints
ca. 1529
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Pontormo
The Visitation
1528-29
drawing (compositional study)
Gabinetto dei Disegni,
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Pontormo
The Visitation
1528-29
oil on panel
Pieve di San Michele Arcangelo, Carmignano

Pontormo
The Visitation
ca. 1514-16
fresco
Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, Florence

Pontormo
Supper at Emmaus
1525
oil on canvas
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Pontormo
Portrait of a Halberdier
ca. 1530-40
drawing (figure study)
Gabinetto dei Disegni,
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Pontormo
Portrait of a Halberdier
ca. 1530-40
oil on canvas
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Pontormo
Portrait of a Youth
ca. 1525
oil on canvas
Palazzo Mansi, Lucca

Pontormo
Portrait of Monsignor della Casa
ca. 1541-44
oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Pontormo
Joseph in Egypt
Episodes with Jacob

1515-18
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Pontormo
Joseph in Egypt
Episodes with Jacob
(detail)
1515-18
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Pontormo
Joseph in Egypt
Punishment of the Baker

1515-18
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Pontormo
Joseph in Egypt
Joseph's Brothers beg for Help

1515-18
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

"The great protagonist of the first Florentine Maniera lived into the time of full fruition of the high Maniera (he died on 1 January 1557), and in this time his contribution signified both participation in the newer style and dissent from it.  Pontormo shared in the development of those aspects of the high Maniera of which his own inventions were a precedent, but did not yield the basic tenet that distinguished his attitude towards art from it.  We have earlier defined the core of Pontormo's difference from the high Maniera, too summarily, as the fusion that he makes between form and an expressive value that is not just in the form but in the complex human psyche and in the matter the form illustrates.  As his descendants of the high Maniera made more quantitative ornamental value out of form, so in these later years did Jacopo, but his ornament remained a value with a different content in it of emotive poignance.  His art became almost as elaborate as theirs, as arbitrary in its pattern-making and in the canons of behavior that he assumed for his actors.  His manner was more arbitrary in the liberties that he now, as earlier, took with nature: the high Maniera, after all, was an aesthetic that had to do with a specialized conception of propriety, in which there were 'correct' limits of representational licence, as much as of emotional response, which should not be trespassed.  Pontormo's individuality, which had created a vocabulary of Maniera as an agency for personal expression, was not disposed to accept the restrictions that the new generation had invented for it.  He remained, throughout the years of Bronzino's and Vasari's rise, the most formidable figure on the Florentine scene, but a disquieting one, more worrisome – and at times antipathetic – to his Maniera colleagues of the second generation, than he had been earlier to the classical establishment."

– S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (1970)