Home Forums Blogs Articles Photos Videos Contact FAQ

Pontormo - Life

Pontormo - Life: Encyclopedia II - Pontormo - Life

Vasari relates how the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy and lonely," was shuttled around as a young apprentice: "Jacopo had not been many months in Florence before Bernardo Vettori sent him to stay with Leonardo da Vinci, and then with Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and finally, in 1512, with Andrea del Sarto, with whom he did not remain long, for after he had done the cartoons for the arch of the Servites, it does not seem that Andrea bore him any good will, whatever ...

Pontormo: Encyclopedia II - Pontormo - Life

Pontormo - Life

Vasari relates how the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy and lonely," was shuttled around as a young apprentice:

"Jacopo had not been many months in Florence before Bernardo Vettori sent him to stay with Leonardo da Vinci, and then with Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and finally, in 1512, with Andrea del Sarto, with whom he did not remain long, for after he had done the cartoons for the arch of the Servites, it does not seem that Andrea bore him any good will, whatever the cause may have been."

Haunted faces and elongated bodies are characteristic of his work. An example of Pontormo's early style is The Visitation of the Virgin and St Anne, with its dancelike, balanced figures, painted from 1514 to 1516 for the parish church of St. Michele in Carmignano, a few miles from Florence. In 1519-20 Pontormo also took part in the fresco decoration of the salon of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano, not far from Florence. There he painted frescoes in a pastoral genre style, very uncommon for Florentine painters; their subject was the obscure classical myth of Vertumnus and Pomona in a lunette.

In 1522, when the plague broke out in Florence, Pontormo left for the Certosa di Galuzzo, a cloistered Carthusian monastery where the monks followed vows of silence. He painted a series of frescoes, now quite damaged, on the passion and resurrection of Christ.