Pontormo e Rosso Fiorentino. Divergenti vie della “maniera”

Born in the same year, 1494, and trained alongside each other in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino became the two most unconventional painters of the “modern manner” described by Giorgio Vasari. This catalog accompanied the exhibition that brought them together again, nearly sixty years after the 1956 Florentine show devoted to Pontormo and early Mannerism.

Curated by Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali, then director of the Uffizi, the exhibition gathered more than 80 works, including some 50 paintings, roughly 70 percent of the two artists’ output, along with drawings, tapestries and prints. Pontormo’s Visitation from Carmignano, Supper at Emmaus and Venus and Cupid appear beside Rosso’s Death of Cleopatra, the Pietà from the Louvre and Bacchus, Venus and Cupid from Luxembourg. Lenders included the National Gallery of Art in Washington and The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Ten sections follow the two painters along parallel paths: from the early frescoes in the cloister of the Santissima Annunziata to portraits and drawings, the Roman years and the Sack of Rome, and finally the courts of Fontainebleau and Medici Florence, with an eye on how Vasari’s Lives shaped their reputations.

A key reference for collectors and students of Florentine Mannerism and the Italian Renaissance.