Pontormo settled down in Rome
PONTORMO
or the Art of Surpassing Nature
A Letter, a Manifesto of Mannerism
In 1547, Benedetto Varchi invited some of the leading artists of Cosimo I de' Medici's Florence — including Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari, Benvenuto Cellini, Agnolo Bronzino and Jacopo Pontormo — to address a question central to Renaissance artistic debate: which was the nobler art, painting or sculpture? Their responses were subsequently published in Florence in 1549 by Lorenzo Torrentino, in Varchi's celebrated Due lezzioni (Two Lectures).
Pontormo's reply is striking. Rather than favouring either art, he declares that the question 'cannot be debated, still less resolved', since both share a single, supremely noble foundation: 'and that is drawing' (disegno).
Yet it is another passage in the letter that seems to offer the key to understanding his extraordinary pictorial world: almost a manifesto for an entire artistic era.
Pontormo writes that the painter is 'eager to imitate all the things that nature has created', but above all aspires to 'improve them and, through art, endow them with grace', bringing together in his compositions 'all that nature has ever made'.
To imitate nature, then, is not enough: the artist must improve it, transform it and endow it with a grace born of ingenuity and creative freedom.
Here emerges one of the most compelling expressions of Mannerist thought: beauty is not merely something the artist observes and reproduces, but something that can be conceived and brought into being through drawing and the intellect.
The grace of Pontormo's figures, the elegant twists of their bodies, his sophisticated colour harmonies and daring compositions thus acquire a deeper significance: they are not merely expressions of a style, but of a particular conception of humanity, even before they are a conception of painting.
Art no longer merely imitates nature: it aspires to surpass it.
Let us now allow the images captured during our visit to the exhibition to speak for themselves, conveying, more vividly than any account, the timeless beauty of Pontormo's art.
Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome