Pontormo’s unconventional genius takes center stage at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale, where an exhibition dedicated to the Renaissance painter runs through February 7. Curated by Cristina Acidini, the show bears the artist’s name and traces the full arc of his career. Spread across two floors — brighter downstairs, perhaps dimly lit upstairs — it brings together 84 works by the Tuscan master and 46 by his contemporaries and pupils.

Highlights include masterpieces such as The Deposition, The Visitation and Supper at Emmaus, as well as the Portrait of Cosimo the Elder from the Uffizi Galleries and The Halberdier from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The paintings are complemented by a selection of drawings related to Pontormo’s work as a portraitist and by his writings, especially his diary, known as Libro mio (My Book).

Pontormo (1494–1557), born Jacopo Carucci, took his better-known name from his birthplace, Pontorme, near Empoli. The name was given to him by Giorgio Vasari. He trained in the workshops of masters such as Andrea del Sarto and drew inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. His artistic vision took shape through a rejection of the balance, classical perspective and proportions that defined Renaissance art, as he sought a more personal mode of expression.

The exhibition retraces his career from his early years in republican Florence and his growing popularity among the bourgeoisie to commissions from the restored Medici dynasty. It also explores his stay at the Certosa del Galluzzo, where he took refuge in 1523 to escape the plague sweeping the city.

Pontormo later worked during another republican interlude, following the arrival of the Landsknechts in Italy, before entering a period of closer engagement with Michelangelo. At Michelangelo’s request, he translated two of the master’s preparatory drawings into paintings: Noli me tangere and Venus and Cupid. When the Medici returned to power, Pontormo once again entered their services, becoming a court artist and portraitist as well as the teacher of Bronzino.

Critics have often regarded Pontormo’s art as enigmatic, even artificial. He deliberately broke with the Renaissance ideal of imitating nature, embracing instead the principles of Mannerism, a movement in which art sought not merely to reproduce reality but to transcend it through stylistic reinterpretation. This was the Italian maniera, building on the achievements of masters such as Michelangelo and Raphael.

Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo was a particular influence, notably in its use of color. Pontormo developed a palette of vivid, luminous and sometimes acidic hues — pink, blue, green and orange — that seem to liberate painting from the constraints of naturalistic representation.

His figures, particularly in The Deposition, displayed prominently in the main gallery at the Scuderie, appear weightless, almost floating in space. They often seem detached from physical gravity, suspended in settings that resist definition. His paintings frequently lack recognizable landscapes or architectural backgrounds.

Pontormo’s art reflects a restless, melancholy and solitary temperament, anticipating a modern, existential sensibility that would fascinate artists and writers well into the 20th century. His Mannerism was more than visual artifice or aesthetic virtuosity: it was an artistic response to the anxieties and spiritual crisis of his age, giving expression to the erosion of the humanist certainties that had shaped the early Renaissance.

Together with Andrea del Sarto and Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo also helped forge a distinctive Florentine response to Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s departure for Rome, where they worked under papal patronage.

As Acidini emphasizes, Pontormo’s defining quality was his extraordinary creativity and his willingness to approach traditional subjects experimentally, without fear of departing from established models. The exhibition was developed with the participation of Elena Capretti, Philippe Costamagna, Bruce Edelstein and Carlo Falciani.

The show also reveals a surprising discovery. During the restoration of a painting originally identified as Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, restorers removed a later layer of drapery and uncovered a wing on the child’s shoulder. The figure was not Saint John the Baptist after all, but a little angel. The discovery led to a change in the work’s title — and added yet another twist to the enduring mystery of Pontormo.

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