The icy blues, the incredible pinks of an eccentric and grumpy painter

Dino Buzzati claimed that the disturbing visions depicted by Hieronymus Bosch were the result of ergot present in the bread eaten by the fifteenth-century artist. In fact, lysergic acid was derived from that substance, which was synthesised centuries later. Therefore, the observation made by the late master of video art, Bill Viola, regarding Jacopo Carucci – known as Pontormo – from whose Visitation the American artist drew inspiration for one of his most famous video works, The Greeting (1995), does not sound all that far-fetched: “I asked myself, quite honestly, what the painter must have been smoking to paint those pinks, to paint those incredible blues. It seemed as though he’d been working under the influence of LSD.” Here, Viola was referring to another masterpiece by the artist, a native of Pontorme, a suburb of Empoli: The Deposition, or rather The Carrying of Christ, given that the Cross from which Jesus is unnailed and laid down is not present.

It is chiefly, though not exclusively, because of his colours that Pontormo has attracted such extraordinary critical attention: his chromatic dissonances – or rather, new harmonies – have left many viewers speechless: “… very pale, unripe colours, the colours of squeezed grass and the juices of spring flowers – periwinkles, roses, violets, the yellow of pollen, the green of slender stems” (Giuliano Briganti); even Elsa de Giorgi, the actress and poetess who was Italo Calvino’s lover, having spent years surrounded by Pontormo’s works collected by her husband Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, was struck by them and wrote of them in a poem addressed to her friend Pier Paolo Pasolini: “And you, Pontormo, with your icy blues, the elusive smiles of deadly innocence”. Giovanni Testori reflected poetically on the expressive power of *The Transport of the Capponi Chapel* in Santa Felicita in Florence, which is now on splendid display in the magnificent exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale: “… it leaves the traces of nature / kindles colour within itself / and at the same time crumbles / so that it may become a brother / to every mournful message”. It is therefore no coincidence that the actor Sandro Lombardi, a great admirer of Testori, was chosen to portray Pontormo in the evocative exhibition of Vasarian video portraits, Revox, curated by the director and art historian Federico Tiezzi. This gallery of Pontormo enthusiasts, rich in references, can only conclude with the intense Ricotta by PPP, a director and pupil of Roberto Longhi, who in this film sequence combines colour – as indeed in the original work – with composition, alongside the unnatural, unbearable, postures of the subjects’ bodies (who, in the film, end up in a painful and metaphorical collapse), which earned Pontormo, for this and other works, the label of ‘anti-naturalist’. Did Jacopo, then, pay no heed to truth or reality, despite his early Florentine apprenticeship under Leonardo?

We must place ourselves in the context of that era, when the triad of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo – having moved from Florence to Rome – reigned supreme in the artistic imagination and on the art market of the 16th century; and what else could the artists of the second circle of the Florentine school, who remained on the Arno, do but paint ‘in the Italian manner’ (Mannerists) of the three great masters? ‘Manner’, however, is not simply copy-and-paste, as was once believed; Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Bronzino and others took the revered masters into account, but each sought the Truth along their own path, perhaps with less outward perfection and more inner emotion: Pontormo, aided in this by a restless and moody temperament, was the most eccentric and altered the alterable. As proof of his gruff eccentricity, one cannot fail to mention his house, which was accessed via a staircase that he would often pull up to avoid nuisances: a bit like Il Barone Rampante. Or his diary from his final days, on display at the Scuderie, in which he meticulously recorded his eating habits and even his bowel movements: a bit like Feuerbach.

The magnificent exhibition in Rome, curated by Cristina Acidini – who led the team and authored a brilliant essay in the catalogue – owes its greatest merit to this: having brought together, for the first time outside Florence and in a venue open to the general public, a rich collection of works by an artist highly revered within the select, high-level circles of historians and critics. Enjoy Pontormo, everyone.