PONTORMO
1494 - 1556

Jacopo Carucci, more widely known as JACOPO DA PONTORMO, was born at Pontormo, or Puntormo, in the May of 1494, the son of a painter Bartolommeo Carucci. The lad lost his father at five and his mother at ten, and was placed, if we are to go by Vasari's gossip, under Leonardo da Vinci, then under Albertinelli, then under Piero di Cosimo, from whom he passed to the care of Andrea del Sarto in 1512, in his eighteenth year.

Pontormo was a man of genius, who wrought portraits and wall-paintings which prove him possessed of qualities which might have lifted him to very high achievement ; but who fell under the spell, and thence to imitation, of Michelangelo, to end as an academic who saw high art in vast nudes. As a portrait-painter, however, he came to [246] greatness, as is shown in his famous panel of Cosimo dei Medici at San Marco, and his Lady with a Dog at Frankfurt.

When Pontormo thrust the vision of his masters from him and uttered his own impressions, he painted upon the wall the blithe, fresh fancy of the fresco of Vertumnus, Pomona, and Diana, a lunette painted round a window at the Royal Villa near Florence, Poggio a Caiano, with a sense of colour and design that set him amongst the foremost artists of his day. Such achievements, and his great portraiture, blot out the riots of fantastic nudes in the Michelangelesque imitation which led him along the road to meaningless falsities. The ambitious design, on which he spent eleven years of his life, in his Michelangelesque style, the huge frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo at Florence, of The Deluge and The Last Judgment, have long been covered with whitewash. Happily, his powerful portraits did not tempt him to sink his own individuality, and their rich colour and lively air are his best hostages to fame. He died in Florence at the end of 1556, being buried in the church of the Annunziata there, on the 2nd of January 1557, his fresco of the Visitation in the court of the Annunziata standing as his fine epitaph.

In Pontormo's studio was trained a pupil, afterwards to come to fame as Bronzino, who assisted him in many of his works, and finished Pontormo's huge frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo, before the whitewash swallowed them.

BRONZINO
1502 - 1572

ANGELO ALLORI, called BRONZINO, was born near Florence, at Monticelli, in 1502, and, as has been seen, became pupil to Pontormo, and assistant and completer of his unfinished designs. Bronzino is also sometimes confusingly called [247] ANGIOLO DI COSIMO. Born when Michelangelo was twenty-seven, and at the height of his powers ; growing to manhood when Michelangelo's compelling genius and gigantic achievement wholly overwhelmed the art of Florence and Rome, Bronzino died some eight years after the giant of the Renaissance was laid in his grave. He lived, therefore, in the supreme years of the Florentine achievement ; and his dying eyes beheld the complete collapse of that achievement. In Venice, beyond the mountains, the Venetian achievement was at its highest pitch of splendour, Titian being but a youth when Bronzino first saw the light.

Bronzino was, like Rosso or Rossi de' Salviati, a close friend of Vasari, the interesting writer of art gossip and biography of the Italian Renaissance.

It is the present fashion to decry the art of Bronzino ; and perhaps the exaggerated estimate of his day has been answerable for the injustice. In Bronzino was born to the later years of the Renaissance of Italy a portrait-painter of marked power, and one who was to have a prodigious influence throughout Europe in the years to come. So markedly influenced by his master, Pontormo, that it would be difficult to say where the master's hand finishes and the assistant takes up the brush in the work they wrought together ; and so closely akin in their qualities that the experts are hard put to it to-day sometimes to decide whether master or pupil painted certain portraits.

Bronzino was poet as well as painter, running much to burlesques, not devoid of naughtiness ; and the poems of his pen reveal a questionable laxity in affairs of sex not wholly absent from his painted allegories. But when John Addington Symonds, an astoundingly clear-sighted critic of the art of the Renaissance when we consider the attitude towards art in the eighteen-seventies, condemns [248] Bronzino's fine "Allegory " of Venus and Cupid with Time and Folly, at the National Gallery in London, as " detestable," one suspects his "propriety," and questions his taste. It was the Victorian censor of all the moralities burning in a strange vessel. Nor is it easy to discover therein the " defects of Raphael's and Michelangelo's imitators," for it recalls neither the one nor the other ; Bronzino had been looking upon a far different master of the allegory, called Botticelli. And the last charge that can be laid against it is that it shows either "want of thought" or of "feeling," or is " combined with the presumptuous treatment of colossal and imaginative subjects," nor that this combination " renders it inexpressibly chilling." He who finds this somewhat hot work of art to be " chilling " must lack the sense of temperature. Bronzino understood the French King, for whom he painted it-Francis the First-better than the critics have understood the significance of art. Indeed, whether the lack of " chill " in this design be an affair of bad art or good art, according to Symonds is of little account. In it is much good art, whatever the morals, for we see therein the real significance of the artist uttering with truth the emotion that was in him-it is a fine achievement. It is, besides, significant of his age. Bronzino, essaying the religious picture-as in his large and dull " Limbo " or Descent of Christ into Hell-is seen affecting the religiosities without conviction-employing a subject which has small place in his senses, in order to create a turmoil of the nudes with what he took to be the grand manner of Michelangelo-painting the nude for the sake of showing off his academic capacity for painting the naked, wholly without spiritual significance, lacking largeness of design, poverty-stricken in the colour-sense. It was exactly in his pagan allegories that he came nearest to striking fire from the rigid, cold, hard anvil of his art.

XXVII
SCHOOL OF BRONZINO
1502 - 1572
FLORENTINE SCHOOL
"PORTRAIT OF A BOY"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
This portrait of a noble fledgling gives no full idea of the superb achievement of Bronzino in portraiture. His Venus-piece in the same gallery is one of the most valuable treasures in this great collection.
Painted on wood. 4 ft. 2 1/2 in. h. x 2 ft. w. (1.282 x 0.698)