Pontormo

Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1557) painted figures that seem to float in colored dreams. Born Jacopo Carucci in Pontormo near Empoli, he was orphaned young and passed through the workshops of Leonardo da Vinci, Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea del Sarto before emerging as Florence's most original painter.

His work marks the break from High Renaissance harmony into Mannerism. Elongated bodies, ambiguous space, haunted faces, colors that seem to glow from within. His Deposition (1525–28) in the Capponi Chapel shows figures arranged in a spiral, their pale pink and blue robes impossibly bright, their grief somehow both theatrical and genuine. There's no cross, no ground, no clear source of light. Just bodies suspended in grief.

The Medici kept him busy. He painted frescoes at their villa at Poggio a Caiano, decorated their chapel at San Lorenzo, worked on their tombs. He was popular with the powerful. But according to biographer Giorgio Vasari, he was also deeply eccentric: reclusive, anxious, prone to obsessions. A diary survives from his last years (1554–57), recording his meals, his bowel movements, his moods. He spent the final decade of his life on the San Lorenzo frescoes, work known today only from drawings. The frescoes themselves were destroyed. His pupil was Agnolo Bronzino, who became the leading painter of late Florentine Mannerism. Pontormo's paintings are at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.