Pontormo's Diary

Pontormo's Diary

Born May 24th, 1494 in Pontorme, a village near Empoli, Italy, Jacopo Carucci (d. 1557) was a prominent representative of the Florentine school. Commonly known as Pontormo, a wink to his hometown, he was a Mannerist and portraitist whose body of work represents a profound stylistic shift in the art of the Florentine Renaissance, moving away from its calm perspectival regularity. Twinning poses, ambiguous perspectives, and figures with haunting faces and elongated bodies that seem to float unhampered by gravity distinguish his art. He was orphaned at a young age, but apprenticed in some of the finest workshops in Italy, learning from artists like Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea del Sarto, and even Leonardo da Vinci. Once he established himself as an artist, he often enjoyed the patronage of the Medici family and a number of his paintings hang in the Uffizi Gallery today. Pontormo’s personality, as depicted by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), has colored much of our image of an artist: withdrawn, neurotic, lonely, and paranoid. This characterization may have been biased, as Vasari was in competition with Pontormo at the time, and artists maligning one another out of jealousy is not difficult to imagine. Nonetheless, Pontormo was at the center of artistic life in his day.

A Glimpse into the Artist’s Mind

Pontormo’s Diary, which the artist referred to as My Book, was written between 1554 and 1556, during a time when Pontormo was working in solitude on a massive fresco (which is now lost) in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. The diary is as much about his diet as it is about his art. The two subjects are so intertwined as to often be mentioned in the same sentence. He seems to have been obsessed with maintaining a moderate diet, and was greatly concerned with various maladies that could befall someone depending on the season. The weather, his deteriorating health, and even his bowel movements are detailed, as is an increasingly strained relationship with his apprentice, Giovanni Battista Naldini (1535–1591). Apparently, the apprentice had been caring for the aging master, who nonetheless continues to scold and be critical of him, driving Battista away and eventually into the workshop of his rival Vasari in 1562.