Public lecture "Pontormo: Returned to Renown"
As a budding artist, Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1557) studied with Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo and Raphael both proclaimed he would be the next great Florentine artist. He became the favoured artist of the Medici family from the 1520s and frescoed the choir of their parish church, San Lorenzo, the most important publicly visible space in Florence. Yet changes in values and stylistic preferences over the succeeding centuries consigned him to the depths of failure. This talk will correct those misconceptions and mistakes, restoring him to his proper status as a great artist as well as presenting some new works. We will find that the San Lorenzo frescoes have been incorrectly reconstructed and their meaning drastically misunderstood. And what was Pontormo’s life like? We will debunk the prevailing idea of him as anti-social. We will consider the fragmentary diary record he left, which supplies a very important detail about how he planned and created his large-scale projects.
Elizabeth Pilliod is the author of Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art, Yale University Press, 2001, and Pontormo at San Lorenzo: The Making and Meaning of a Lost Renaissance Masterpiece, Brepols, 2022. An authority on 16th-century Florentine art, her wide- ranging interests are reflected in publications like “Botticelli: Master of Florentine Portraiture,” Botticelli: Renaissance Man, Sotheby’s, New York, January 28, 2021; “Inside George Segal,” George Segal in Black and White, Rutgers Camden Center for the Arts, 2016; “Regarding the Hebrew in Bronzino’s ‘Holy Family’ for Bartolomeo Panciatichi,” Artibus et historiae (2010); and “Ingestion/Pontormo’s Diary: Food and the Management of the Artist’s Melancholy,” Cabinet Magazine (2005). Her collaborations on exhibitions include: Pontormo, Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, 2026-2027; Pier Francesco Foschi (1502-1567), Galleria dell’ Accademia, Florence, Italy, 2023-2024; Power and Identity: Portraits in the Florence of Cosimo I de’ Medici, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021; Miraculous Encounters: Pontormo from Drawing to Painting, Palazzo Pitti, Florence; Morgan Library & Museum, and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018-19; Bronzino. Artist and Poet, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, 2010-2011; and The Drawings of Bronzino, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010. Associate Professor at Rutgers University, Camden, she has been a fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, and her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Kress Foundation.
© associative image: Portrait of Jacopo Pontormo from Giorgio Vasari's 'Lives of the Artists' (1568)