Pontormo
Illustration from "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects" by Giorgio Vasari, edition of 1568.
Birth name	Jacopo Carucci
Born	(1494-05-24)May 24, 1494 Pontorme near Empoli, Italy
Died	January 2, 1557(1557-01-02) (aged 62) Florence, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting
Movement	Mannerism
Works	The Deposition from the Cross

Jacopo Carucci (May 24, 1494 – January 2, 1557), usually known as Jacopo da Pontormo, Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo, was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine school. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.

Biography and early work[link]

Visitation, 1514-16; Fresco; 392 x 337 cm; SS. Annunziata, Florence.

Jacopo Carucci was born at Pontorme, near Empoli, to Bartolomeo di Jacopo di Martino Carrucci and Alessandra di Pasquale di Zanobi. 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.

Pontormo painted in and around Florence, often supported by Medici patronage. A foray to Rome, largely to see Michelangelo's work, influenced his later style. 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 Elizabeth, with its dancelike, balanced figures, painted from 1514 to 1516.

This early Visitation makes an interesting comparison with his painting of the same subject (at right), which was done about a decade later for the parish church of St. Michael in Carmignano, about 20 km west of Florence. Placing these two pictures together—one from his early style, and another from his mature period—throws Pontormo's artistic development into sharp relief. In the earlier work, Pontormo is much closer in style to his teacher, Andrea del Sarto, and to the early sixteenth century renaissance artistic principles. For example, the figures stand at just under half the height of the overall picture, and though a bit more crowded than true high renaissance balance would prefer, at least are placed in a classicizing architectural setting at a comfortable distance from the viewer. In the later work, the viewer is brought almost uncomfortably close to the Virgin and St. Elizabeth, who drift toward each other in clouds of drapery. Moreover, the clear architectural setting that is carefully constructed in earlier piece has been completely abandoned in favor of a peculiar nondescript urban setting.

Joseph in Egypt, 1515-18; Oil on wood; 96 x 109 cm; National Gallery, London.

The Joseph canvases (now in the National Gallery in London) offer another example of Pontormo's developing style. Done around the same time as the earlier Visitation, these works (such as Joseph in Egypt, at left) show a much more mannerist leaning. According to Giorgio Vasari, the sitter for the boy seated on a step is his young apprentice, Bronzino.

In the years between the SS Annunziata and San Michele Visitations, Pontormo took part in the fresco decoration of the salon of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano (1519–20), 17 km NNW of 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.

From lunette of Vertumnus and Pomona, 1520-21

In 1522, when the plague broke out in Florence, Pontormo left for the Certosa di Galluzzo, 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.

Main works in Florence[link]

Deposition from the Cross, 1525-1528.

The large altarpiece canvas for the Brunelleschi-designed Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, portraying The Deposition from the Cross, is considered by many Pontormo's surviving masterpiece (1528).

The figures, with their sharply modeled forms and brilliant colors are united in an enormously complex, swirling ovular composition, housed by a shallow, somewhat flattened space. Although commonly known as The Deposition from the Cross, there is no actual cross in the picture. The scene might more properly be called a Lamentation or Bearing the Body of Christ. Those who are lowering (or supporting) Christ appear as anguished as the mourners. Though they are bearing the weight of a full-grown man, they barely seem to be touching the ground; the lower figure in particular balances delicately and implausibly on his front two toes. These two boys have sometimes been interpreted as Angels, carrying Christ in his journey to Heaven. In this case, the subject of the picture would be more akin to an Entombment, though the lack of any discernible tomb disrupts that theory, just as the lack of cross poses a problem for the Deposition interpretation. Finally, it has also been noted that the positions of Christ and the Virgin seem to echo those of Michelangelo's Pietà in Rome, though here in the Deposition mother and son have been separated. Thus in addition to elements of a Lamentation and Entombment, this picture carries hints of a Pietà.^[1] It has been speculated that the bearded figure in the background at the far right is a self-portrait of Pontormo as Joseph of Arimathea. Another unique feature of this particular Deposition is the empty space occupying the central pictorial plane as all the Biblical personages seem to fall back from this point. It has been suggested that this emptiness may be a physical representation of the Virgin Mary's emotional emptiness at the prospect of losing her son.

Annunciation, fresco

On the wall to the right of the Deposition, Pontormo frescoed an Annunciation scene (at left). As with the Deposition, the artist's primary attention is on the figures themselves rather than their setting. Placed against white walls, the Angel Gabriel and Virgin Mary are presented in an environment that is so simplified as to almost seem stark. The fictive architectural details above each of them, are painted to resemble the gray stone pietra serena that adorns the interior of Santa Felicità, thus uniting their painted space with the viewer's actual space. The startling contrast between the figures and ground makes their brilliant garments almost seem to glow in the light of the window between them, against the stripped-down background, as if the couple miraculously appeared in an extension of the chapel wall. The Annunciation resembles his above mentioned Visitation in the church of San Michele at Carmignano in both the style and swaying postures.

Vasari tells us that the cupola was originally painted with God the Father and Four Patriarchs. The decoration in the dome of the chapel is now lost, but four roundels with the Evangelists still adorn the pendentives, worked on by both Pontormo and his chief pupil Agnolo Bronzino. The two artists collaborated so intimately, that specialists dispute which roundels each of them painted.

This tumultuous oval of figures took three years for Pontormo to complete. According to Vasari, because Pontormo desired above all to "do things his own way without being bothered by anyone," the artist screened off the chapel so as to prevent interfering opinions. Vasari continues, "And so, having painted it in his own way without any of his friends being able to point anything out to him, it was finally uncovered and seen with astonishment by all of Florence..."^[2]

A number of Pontormo's other works have also remained in Florence; the Uffizi Gallery holds his mystical Supper at Emmaus as well as portraits.

Many of Pontormo's well known canvases, such as the early Joseph in Egypt series (c. 1515) and the later Martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban Legion (c. 1531) depict crowds milling about in extreme contrapposto of greatly varied positions.

His portraits, acutely characterized, show similarly Mannerist proportions.

Lost or damaged works[link]

Christ and Creation of Eve

Study for Deluge

Dead in Last Judgment

Many of Pontormo's works have been damaged, including the lunnettes for the cloister in the Carthusian monastery of Galluzo. They are now displayed indoors, although in their damaged state.

Perhaps most tragic is the loss of the unfinished frescoes for the church of San Lorenzo which consumed the last decade of his life. His frescoes depicted a last judgement day composed of an unsettling morass of writhing figures. The remaining drawings, showing a bizarre and mystical ribboning of bodies, had an almost hallucinatory effect. Florentine figure painting had mainly stressed linear and sculptural figures. For example, the Christ in Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel is a massive painted block, stern in his wrath; by contrast, Pontormo's Jesus in the Last Judgment twists sinuously, as if rippling through the heavens in the dance of ultimate finality. Angels swirl about him in even more serpentine poses. If Pontormo's work from the 1520s seemed to float an a world little touched by gravitational force, the Last Judgment figures seem to have escaped it altogether and fly through a rarefied air.

In his Last Judgment Pontormo went against pictorial and theological tradition by placing God the Father at the feet of Christ, instead of above him, an idea Vasari found deeply disturbing:

But I have never been able to understand the significance of this scene, although I know that Jacopo had wit enough for himself, and also associated with learned and lettered persons; I mean, what he could have intended to signify in that part where there is Christ on high, raising the dead, and below His feet is God the Father, who is creating Adam and Eve. Besides this, in one of the corners, where are the four Evangelists, nude, with books in their hands, it does not seem to me that in a single place did he give a thought to any order of composition, or measurement, or time, or variety in the heads, or diversity in the flesh-colours, or, in a word, to any rule, proportion or law of perspective, for the whole work is full of nude figures with an order, design, invention, composition, colouring, and painting contrived after his own fashion, and with such melancholy and so little satisfaction for him who beholds the work, that I am determined, since I myself do not understand it, although I am a painter, to leave all who may see it to form their own judgement, for the reason that I believe that I would drive myself mad with it, and would bury myself alive, even as it appears to me that Jacopo in the period of eleven years that he spent upon it sought to bury himself and all who might see the painting, among all those extraordinary figures... Wherefore it appears that in this work he paid no attention to anything save certain parts, and of the other more important parts he took no account whatever. In a word, whereas he had thought in the work to surpass all the paintings in the world of art, he failed by a great measure to equal his own (past) works; whence it is evident that he who seeks to strive beyond his strength and, as it were, to force nature, ruins the good qualities with which he may have been liberally endowed by her.(1)

Critical assessment and legacy[link]

Vasari's Life of Pontormo, depicts him as withdrawn and steeped in neurosis while at the center of the artists and patrons of his lifetime. This image of Pontormo has tended to color the popular conception of the artist, as seen in the film of Giovanni Fago, Pontormo, a heretical love. Fago portrays Pontormo as mired in a lonely and ultimately paranoid dedication to his final Last Judgment project, which he often kept shielded from onlookers. Yet as the art historian Elizabeth Pilliod has pointed out, Vasari was in fierce competition with the Pontormo/Bronzino workshop at the time when he was writing his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. This professional rivalry between the two bottegas could well have provided Vasari with ample motivation for running down the artistic lineage of his opponent for Medici patronage.^[3]

Perhaps as a result of Vasari's derision, or perhaps because of the vagaries of aesthetic taste, Potormo's work was quite out of fashion for several centuries. The fact that so much of his work has been lost or severely damaged is testament to this neglect, though he has received renewed attention by contemporary art historians. Indeed, between 1989 and 2002, Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier (at right), held the title of the world's most expensive painting by an Old Master.

Regardless as to the veracity of Vasari's account, it is certainly true that Pontormo's artistic idiosyncrasies produced a style that few were able (or willing) to imitate, with the exception of his closest pupil Bronzino. Bronzino's early work is so close to that of his teacher, that the authorship of several paintings from the 1520s and '30s are still under dispute—for example the four tondi containing the evangelists in the Capponi Chapel, and the Portrait of a Lady in Red now in Frankfurt (at left).

Pontormo shares some of the mannerism of Rosso Fiorentino and of Parmigianino. In some ways he anticipated the Baroque as well as the tensions of El Greco. His eccentricities also resulted in an original sense of composition. At best, his compositions are cohesive. The figures in the Deposition, for example, appear to sustain each other: removal of any one of them would cause the edifice to collapse. In other works, as in the Joseph canvases, the crowding makes for a confusing pictorial melee. It is in the later drawings that we see a graceful fusion of bodies in a composition which includes the oval frame of Jesus in the Last Judgement.

Anthology of works[link]

Portrait of a Lady in Red, 1532; Oil on wood; 89,7 x 70,5 cm; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

Portrait of a Halberdier, 1528-1530; Oil on canvas, 92 x 72 cm; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Early works (until 1521)[link]

Mature works (1522-1530)[link]

Late works (after 1530)[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Krystof, Doris. Joseph Carrucci, known as Pontormo 1494-1557. Koln: Konemann, 1988. ISBN 3-8290-0254-8

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jacopo Pontormo

• Pontormo's paintings and drawings illustrated
• Pontormo at Olga's Gallery
• Giorgio Vasari's Vita (English)
• A diary of his last two years survives [42]

Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1554/1557 – 12 August 1612) was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.

Biography[link]

Gabrieli was born in Venice. He was one of five children, and his father came from the region of Carnia and went to Venice shortly before Giovanni's birth. While not much is known about Giovanni's early life, he probably studied with his uncle, the composer Andrea Gabrieli; he may indeed have been brought up by him, as is implied by the dedication to his 1587 book of concerti, in which he described himself as "little less than a son" to his uncle.^[1] He also went to Munich to study with the renowned Orlando de Lassus at the court of Duke Albert V; most likely he stayed there until about 1579. Lassus was to be one of the principal influences on the development of his musical style.^[2]

By 1584 he had returned to Venice, where he became principal organist at San Marco di Venezia, also known as Saint Mark's Basilica, in 1585, after Claudio Merulo left the post; following his uncle's death the following year he took the post of principal composer as well. Also after his uncle's death he began editing much of the older man's music, which would otherwise have been lost; Andrea evidently had had little inclination to publish his own music, but Giovanni's opinion of it was sufficiently high that he devoted much of his own time to compiling and editing it for publication.

Gabrieli's career rose further when he took the additional post of organist at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, another post he retained for his entire life. San Rocco was the most prestigious and wealthy of all the Venetian confraternities, and second only to San Marco itself in splendor of its musical establishment. Some of the most renowned singers and instrumentalists in Italy performed there and a vivid description of its musical activity survives in the travel memoirs of the English writer Thomas Coryat. Much of his music was written specifically for that location, although he probably composed even more for San Marco.

San Marco had a long tradition of musical excellence and Gabrieli's work there made him one of the most noted composers in Europe. The vogue that began with his influential volume Sacrae symphoniae (1597) was such that composers from all over Europe, especially from Germany, came to Venice to study. Evidently he also made his new pupils study the madrigals being written in Italy, so not only did they carry back the grand Venetian polychoral style to their home countries, but also the more intimate style of madrigals; Heinrich Schütz and others helped transport the transitional early Baroque music north to Germany, a trend that decisively affected subsequent music history. The productions of the German Baroque, culminating in the music of J.S. Bach, were founded on this strong tradition, which had its roots in Venice.

Gabrieli was increasingly ill after about 1606, at which time church authorities began to appoint deputies to take over duties he could no longer perform. He died in 1612, of complications from a kidney stone.

Music and style[link]

Though Gabrieli composed in many of the forms current at the time, he preferred sacred vocal and instrumental music. All of his secular vocal music is relatively early; he never wrote lighter forms, such as dances; and late in his career he concentrated on sacred vocal and instrumental music that exploited sonority for maximum effect.^[3] Among the innovations credited to him – and while he was not always the first, he was the most famous to do these things – were the use of dynamics; the use of specifically notated instrumentation (as in the famous Sonata pian' e forte); and the use of massive forces arrayed in multiple, spatially separated groups, an idea which was to be the genesis of the Baroque concertato style, and which spread quickly to northern Europe, both by the report of visitors to Venice and by Gabrieli's students, which included Hans Leo Hassler and Heinrich Schütz.^[4][5]

Like composers before and after him, he would use the unusual layout of the San Marco church, with its two choir lofts facing each other, to create striking spatial effects. Most of his pieces are written so that a choir or instrumental group will first be heard on one side, followed by a response from the musicians on the other side; often there was a third group situated on a stage near the main altar in the center of the church.^[6] While this polychoral style had been extant for decades (Adrian Willaert may have made use of it first, at least in Venice) Gabrieli pioneered the use of carefully specified groups of instruments and singers, with precise directions for instrumentation, and in more than two groups. The acoustics were and are such in the church that instruments, correctly positioned, could be heard with perfect clarity at distant points. Thus instrumentation which looks strange on paper, for instance a single string player set against a large group of brass instruments, can be made to sound, in San Marco, in perfect balance. A fine example of these techniques can be seen in the scoring of In Ecclesiis.

Gabrieli's first motets were published alongside his uncle Andrea's compositions in his 1587 volume of Concerti. These pieces show much influence of his uncle's style in the use of dialogue and echo effects.^[7] There are low and high choirs and the difference between their pitches is marked by the use of instrumental accompaniment. The motets published in Giovanni's 1597 Sacrae Symphoniae seem to move away from this technique of close antiphony towards a model in which musical material is not simply echoed, but developed by successive choral entries. Some motets, such as Omnes Gentes developed the model almost to its limits. In these motets, instruments are an integral part of the performance, and only the choirs marked "Capella" are to be performed by singers for each part.^[8]

There seems to be a distinct change in Gabrieli's style after 1605, the year of publication of Monteverdi's Qinto libro di madrigale, and Gabrieli's compositions are in a much more homophonic style as a result. There are sections purely for instruments - called "Sinfonia" - and small sections for soloists singing florid lines, accompanied simply by a basso continuo. "Alleluia" refrains provide refrains within the structure, forming rondo patterns in the motets, with close dialogue between choirs and soloists. In particular, one of his best-known pieces, In Ecclesiis, is a showcase of such polychoral techniques, making use of four separate groups of instrumental and singing performers, underpinned by the omnipresent organ and continuo.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• David Bryant. "Gabrieli, Giovanni." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40693 (accessed September 22, 2009).
• Giulio Ongaro, et al. "Venice." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41311 (accessed September 22, 2009).
• Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music. W.W. Norton & Co., 1980. ISBN 0-393-95136-7
• Richard Charteris, Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555–1612): a Thematic Catalogue of his Music with a Guide to the Source Materials and Translations of his Vocal Texts. New York, 1996.
• Egon Kenton, Life and Works of Giovanni Gabrieli. American Institute of Musicology, 1967 (Armen Carapetyen).
• Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Venetian Instrumental Music, from Gabrieli to Vivaldi. New York, Dover Publications, 1994. ISBN 0-486-28151-5
• Denis Arnold, Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Venetian High Renaissance. London: Oxford University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-19-315247-9
• Denis Arnold, Monteverdi. London, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1975. ISBN 0-460-03155-4
• Denis Arnold, "Giovanni Gabrieli," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
• Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1947. ISBN 0-393-09745-5

External links[link]

• Free scores by Giovanni Gabrieli at the International Music Score Library Project
• Free scores by Giovanni Gabrieli in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Free scores by Giovanni Gabrieli in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
• Listen to free recordings of songs from Umeå Akademiska Kör.

Alessandro di Cristofano di Lorenzo del Bronzino Allori (31 May 1535 – 22 September 1607) was an Italian portrait painter of the late Mannerist Florentine school.

Portrait of Grand Duchess Bianca Capello de Medici, by Allori, Dallas Museum of Art

Born in Florence, in 1540, after the death of his father, he was brought up and trained in art by a close friend, often referred to as his 'uncle', the mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino, whose name he sometimes assumed in his pictures. In some ways, Allori is the last of the line of prominent Florentine painters, of generally undiluted Tuscan artistic heritage: Andrea del Sarto worked with Fra Bartolomeo (as well as Leonardo da Vinci), Pontormo briefly worked under Andrea, and trained Bronzino, who trained Allori. Subsequent generations in the city would be strongly influenced by the tide of Baroque styles pre-eminent in other parts of Italy.

Freedburg derides Allori as derivative, claiming he illustrates "the ideal of Maniera by which art (and style) are generated out of pre-existing art." The polish of figures has an unnatural marble-like form as if he aimed for cold statuary. It can be said of late phase mannerist painting in Florence, that the city that had early breathed life into statuary with the works of masters like Donatello and Michelangelo, was still so awed by them that it petrified the poses of figures in painting. While by 1600 the Baroque elsewhere was beginning to give life to painted figures, Florence was painting two-dimensional statues. Furthermore, in general, with the exception of the Contra Maniera (Counter-Mannerism) artists, it dared not stray from high themes or stray into high emotion.

Among his collaborators was Giovanni Maria Butteri and his main pupil was Giovanni Bizzelli. Cristoforo del Altissimo, Cesare Dandini, Aurelio Lomi, John Mosnier, Giovanni Battista Vanni, and Monanni also were his pupils.^[1] Allori was one of the artists, working under Vasari, included in the decoration of the Studiolo of Francesco I.

He is the father of Cristofano Allori (1577–1621).

Main works[link]

Christ with Mary and Martha, oil on wood, 125 x 118 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum

• Portrait of a Young Man, (1561, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
• Christ and the Samaritan Woman, (Altarpiece, 1575, Santa Maria Novella, now Prato)
• Road to Calvary, (1604, Rome)
• Dead Christ and Angels, (Museum Fine Arts, Budapest)^[2]
• Portrait of Piero de Médici, (São Paulo Art Museum, São Paulo)
• Pearl Fishing, (1570–72, Studiolo of Francesco I, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence)image
• Sussana and the Elders
• Allegory of Human Life^[2]
• The Miracle of St. Peter Walking on Water^[2]
• Venus and Cupid,^[2] (Musée Fabre, Montpellier)

In 2006 the BBC foreign correspondent Sir Charles Wheeler returned an original Alessandro Allori painting to the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. He had been given it in Germany in 1952, but only recently realized its origin and that it must have been looted in the wake of World War II. The work is possibly a portrait of Eleonora (Dianora) di Toledo de' Medici, niece of Eleonora di Toledo, and measures 12 cm x 16 cm.^[3]

References[link]

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.  The article is available here: Alessandro Allori - LoveToKnow 1911
• Alessandro Allori in the "History of Art"
• Painting in Italy 1500-1600, S.J. Freedberg, (Penguin History of Art, 2nd Edition, 1983).
• Hobbes, James R. (1849). Picture collector's manual adapted to the professional man, and the amateur. T&W Boone, 29 Bond Street; Digitized by Googlebooks. http://books.google.com/books?q=intitle:picture+intitle:collector's. 

External links[link]

Media related to Alessandro Allori at Wikimedia Commons

• Alessandro Allori Paitings Gallery (Public Domain Paintings - www.art.onilm.com)

Laura Betti (May 1, 1927^[1] - July 31, 2004) was an Italian actress.

Born Laura Trombetti in Bologna, this blonde and flamboyant actress started her career as jazz singer. Betti made her film debut in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita. In 1963, she became a close friend of the poet and movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom she made a documentary after his death. Under Pasolini's direction she proved a wonderful talent, in many films like La ricotta (1963) and Teorema (Theorem, 1968). In 1976, she portrayed a cruel and eroto-maniacal fascist in Novecento (1900), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Since the 1960s, she dedicated much of her times to literature and politics. She became the muse for a number of leading political and literary figures in Italy and came to personify the revolutionary and Marxist era of 1970s Italy.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Laura Betti at the Internet Movie Database
• Laura Betti at AllRovi
• BBC Obituary
• Il Manifesto Obituaries