Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo (1494–1557), was the most restless and inventive painter of sixteenth-century Florence, the artist who carried the city from the balance of the High Renaissance into the strange, luminous world of Mannerism. Staged in Rome in partnership with the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the exhibition gathered more than 130 works, 84 of them by Pontormo himself, from collections that include the Uffizi, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Edited by Cristina Acidini, one of the leading authorities on Florentine sixteenth-century art, with Elena Capretti, Philippe Costamagna, Bruce Edelstein and Carlo Falciani, the catalog follows the painter’s career step by step: his beginnings and early shared commissions, his first work in Medici Florence and the great paintings of the 1520s, with close looks at the villa at Poggio a Caiano, the Certosa del Galluzzo and the Capponi Chapel in Santa Felicita. Later chapters take in the last Florentine Republic and the siege of the city, his bond with Michelangelo, his work for the Medici dukes and his final project, the choir of San Lorenzo.
American readers will spot familiar loans, among them the Pucci Altarpiece from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, alongside works from the Art Institute of Chicago and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Around 280 illustrations accompany critical essays, full catalog entries, an annotated biography, a chronology setting the artist’s life against the politics and culture of his time, and a bibliography.
An up-to-date reference for students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance and Mannerism, and a beautiful book for anyone drawn to Pontormo‘s acid colors and weightless, elongated figures.
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