Florence rarely disappoints in terms of art exhibitions, and people with an interest in Italian paintings from the 1500s still have a final chance (until 20th July 2014) to visit a unique event featuring works by Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, currently on at Palazzo Strozzi.
Curated by Antonio Natali, director of the Uffizi Gallery, and Carlo Falciani, lecturer in Art History, "Pontormo and Rosso. Diverging Paths of Mannerism" is a landmark exhibition since it features around 80 works - paintings, frescoes, drawings and tapestries - loaned by museums from all over the world including the Florence-based Galleria Palatina and the Uffizi, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Rather than looking at realism, Mannerists focused on elegance, refinement and style, creating in their paintings artful compositions characterised by distorted poses, twisting limbs and ambiguous figures with a strange kind of beauty that surprised. The Renaissance rules of perspective were also ignored by the Mannerists in favour of the representation of symbolic and visionary landscapes.
Trained under Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo and Rosso represented two sides of the Mannerist coin, they had indeed two different stylistic approaches. The exhibition curators tried to free the artists from the bonds that tie them to categories, restoring their independence: Jacopo da Pontormo (original name Jacopo Carrucci) enjoyed the patronage of the Medici family and became known for renewing the traditional approach to composition; Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, better known as Rosso Fiorentino, was instead more tightly bound to tradition, while influenced by Cabalistic literature and esoteric works.
Divided into different sections in chronological order, the exhibition provides visitors with the chance to take a fresh look at the paintings, most of which have been specially restored for the occasion, and opens with three frescoes from the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata - Andrea del Sarto's Journey of the Magi (1511), Rosso's Assumption of the Virgin (1513) and Pontormo's Visitation (1514), alongside the San Marco Altarpiece painted by Fra Bartolomeo (Rosso's spiritual mentor) and Albertinelli. Andrea del Sarto was twenty-three when he began to work in the votive cloister in the Annunziata, and, in 1511, the adolescents Rosso and Pontormo started to frequent the workshop of del Sarto, but their stylistic differences were already evident.
Moving from del Sarto’s Annunciation, the following section analyses the divergence in form and content between the two artists’ works, as Pontormo was influenced by the legacy of Leonardo, while Rosso was interested in experimenting with the Quattrocento tradition.
The differences became more striking by 1517 when del Sarto painted the Madonna of the Harpies, compared in the exhibition with Rosso's Spedalingo Altarpiece (1518) and Pontormo’s Pucci Altarpiece (1518; this work marks the peak of Pontormo's first period of activity).
While Pontormo opted for a modern style becoming the Medici's painter of choice, Rosso preserved an anachronistic style turning into the favourite painter of the Florentine aristocrats opposed to the Medici and intent on keeping alive the values of the republic. Forced to leave the city in mid-1519, Rosso went in search of work to Piombino, Naples and Volterra where he reached a peak of abstract archaism. Pontormo in the meantime painted portraits of members of the Medici family and Florentine nobles in which he managed to capture and convey the sitters' inner personality.
A section devoted to drawings allows visitors to examine the development of the styles and techniques that the two painters used in their preparatory sketches: some of the drawings illustrate paintings that can't be displayed in exhibitions because of their size (the Deposition and Annunciation in the Church of Santa Felicita) or because they have been lost (the Souls Rising Out of Purgatory and the Flood in the choir of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence).
Among the major drawings by Rosso there are a study of Saint Sebastian in the Dei Altarpiece, loaned by the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, and a design for an altarpiece from the British Museum, these works allow visitors to track the development of his style from Florence to the court of France where he was inspired by Michelangelo. The Madonna of the Holy Girdle from Volognano; the restored Marriage of the Virgin from the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence; the Death of Cleopatra from the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig; and the Deposition from the Cross from Sansepolcro also help visitors following Rosso Fiorentino's travels across Italy and to France.
Pontormo introduced northern European figurative elements and the influence of Dürer in the Supper at Emmaus from the Uffizi, which he painted for the refectory of the Certosa di Galluzzo monastery.
Pontormo’s Supper is contrasted in this section with the Marriage of the Virgin (painted for Carlo Ginori, a follower of Savonarola) in which Rosso introduces important iconographic variations such as the youth of St Joseph.
In late 1523 or early 1524, Rosso moved to Rome where he decorated the Cesi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace and where he discovered classical sculpture and the innovations of Raphael’s school and developed a sophisticated painterly style.
Pontormo and Rosso responded differently to the events that marked Italian history in the following years - the Sack of Rome in 1527 and the Republican Florence yielding to the Medici after being besieged by the troops of Emperor Charles V.
Two paintings in the exhibition captured the distance separating the two artists - Rosso's Deposition in Borgo San Sepolcro and Pontormo's Visitation in Carmignano (Palazzo Strozzi currently hosts also The Greeting by Bill Viola, a work inspired by Pontormo's Visitation).
As the Medici returned to power in Florence in 1530, Pontormo continued working for them, decorating their villas in Castello and Careggi, and working on the now lost frescoes in San Lorenzo. Rosso never returned to Florence, seeking refuge along with other like-minded exiles at the court of Francis I in France, where he succeeded in achieving his dream of becoming a highly valued court artist. The two tapestries Pontormo designed for Cosimo I are juxtaposed to the tapestry that once adorned the gallery of Fontainebleau, inspired by Rosso’s frescoes, to chronicle the artists' court roles.
The exhibition closes with two editions of Giorgio Vasari's Lives, the first one, printed by Lorenzo Torrentino in 1550, open at the life of Rosso Fiorentino, the second, published by Giunti in 1568, at the life of Pontormo.
"Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo developed new modes of expression in comparison with the other artists of their time," state curators Natali and Falciani in an interview accompanying the press release to the exhibition. "Their sharp swerve away from the early 16th century classicism of Raphael, and even from what Vasari called Andrea del Sarto’s painting 'without error', took place around 1514, but each painter then pursued the new 'manner' in a different and independent way. They're identical in their determination to innovate, in their intellectual freedom, in their failure to toe the traditional line and in their ability to mirror complex, troubled times in a figurative style with the loftiest poetic content. However, they are very different in the specific nature of their artistic vocabularies. The exhibition's main contribution to scholarship is that it will allow scholars and visitors to explore the differences in the two artists' figurative vocabulary and in the content of their work."
Image credits for this post
1. Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo (1494-1557), "Visitation", 1528; Oil on panel; 202 x 156 cm; Carmignano, Pieve di San Michele;
2. Giovan Battista di Jacopo, known as Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540), "Madonna and Child with the Young St John the Baptist", c. 1515; Oil on panel; 102.1 x 77.5 cm; Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, inv. no. 952;
3. Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo (1494-1557), "Double Portrait of Friends", 1523-1524; Oil on panel; 88.2 x 68 cm; Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Galleria di Palazzo Cini; Cini 40025;
4. Giovan Battista di Jacopo, known as Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540), "The Death of Cleopatra", c. 1525; Oil on panel; 88 x 75 cm; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich - Museum Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen, inv. GG 479;
5. Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo (1494-1557), "The penitent Saint Jerome", c. 1529; Tempera on panel; 105 x 80 cm; Hannover, Landesmuseum, inv. KM 132.54.
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