Jacopo Carrucci (Pontormo, near Empoli, 1494 - 1557), usually known as Jacopo da Pontormo, or simply Pontormo, was a Florentine painter and portraitist, and one of the classic exemplars of the "Mannerist" style of the 16th century.

He trained with the High Renaissance artist Andrea del Sarto, who became his jealous rival, and spent his whole life in Florence, where he was supported by the Medici. His experimentive distortions of perspective, and harsh jarring colors, hint at his profoundly unsettled personality. A foray to Rome, largely to see Michelangelo's work, influenced his later style.

Vasari relates how after the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy and lonely," was sent to Florence:

"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."

An example of Pontormo's early style is the fresco of The Visitation of the Virgin and St Anne (1514 - 1516), in St. Michele, Carmignano.

A turning point in Pontormo's art was the fresco decoration he executed in the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, not far from Florence. Pontormo took part in the decoration of the salone where he represented the somewhat obscure classical myth of Vertumnus and Pomona in a lunette.

St John the Evangelist, ca1525, Capponi Chapel, Sta. Felicità, Florence

Pontormo's masterpiece is the Deposition from the Cross executed in the Capponi Chapel, Church of Santa Felicità in Florence, about 1528, a whirling oval of figures around the pale dead Christ that took him three years to accomplish The chapel itself was an Early Renaissance work of Brunelleschi, and Pontormo collaborated on the rest of its decor so intimately with Agnolo Bronzino that specialists argue over the precise joint roles they played. Critics are reduced to saying that Pontormo "prefigures" the Baroque or "anticipates" El Greco or Caravaggio, signs of his immense though somewhat studied originality, his strange poses, grimaces and private gestures, entangled compositions, bizarre choices of models.

Vasari's Life of Pontormo, describing him living withdrawn and steeped in neurosis, while at the center of the artists and patrons of his lifetime, makes a fine introduction to the artistic life of the 16th century. A diary of his last two years survives.

External links

• Pontormo's paintings and drawings illustrated (http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/p/pontormo/)
• Giorgio Vasari's Vita (http://www.artist-biography.info/artist/jacopo_da_fontormo/) (English)