"Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence," an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Yes, Nut Job. Pontormo had enough idiocyracies/eccentricities for any Dozen of us.

But Jacopo Pontormo, and his younger contemporary and student, Agnolo Bronzino,  also were best known for their religious painting, brought the blend of monumentality and emotional inwardness, along with formal virtuosity, and applied it with particular audacity to portraiture. Their portraits were an A-list of exceptional personalities.

New York Times
By Holland Cotter
Philadelphia. PA
November 26, 2004

NUT job. That was the word on Jacopo Pontormo, the finest religious painter in 16th-century Florence and guru of Mannerism, a late Renaissance style that crossed Michelangelo's pumped-up classicism with Raphael's skin-so-soft version.

Pontormo wasn't winsome nuts; he was spooky nuts. He lived alone in a room reached by a ladder that he could pull up after him. He was phobic about death. Mention the word and he fell apart. Excruciatingly self-obsessed, in the four years before he died, in 1556 or 1557, he kept a diary, often hour by hour, of every thought he had, every twinge of pain he felt, every morsel of food he ate. He was, in short, an exposed nerve for whom art provided the only protective covering.

That, at least, is the man described by biographer Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary who admired Pontormo's talent but was confounded by his eccentricities. It is not necessarily the person we encounter in "Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence," an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that despite its modest size complicates the standard view of this amazing artist.

Modest means 13 paintings, more than half on loan from Europe, and 20 superb drawings, all but 4 from the Uffizi in Florence. Yet considering how little first-rank Mannerist work exists in American collections - Philadelphia has a lot with two Pontormo pictures, both on view - the show is something of an event. More important, it is a gripping art experience, visually and psychologically.

Pontormo was best known for the distinctive character of his religious painting, a blend of monumentality and emotional inwardness, which he also brought, in some measure, to many of his portraits. His younger contemporary and student, Agnolo Bronzino, learned much from him - their art is sometimes indistinguishable - but his strength lay in formal virtuosity, which he applied with particular audacity to portraiture. No wonder the salonlike room here of portraits by the two artists feels like an A-list party of exceptional personalities.

Among the guests for whom Pontormo is responsible, you'll encounter a pair of aristocratic young men in regulation art-world black, chatting about literature as they frostily scan the crowd. They ignore the shy, frizzy-haired kid in an ill-fitting pink coat beside them. He could be a prince or a court page new to the job. Either way, he looks, as Pontormo's subjects often do, tentative, between emotions, forever at an awkward age.

Across the room, a pensive woman, not young, watches over an equally pensive small child. What could their story be, you wonder, as a red-bearded, Lytton Strachey-ish cleric tries to catch your eye. He'd like to meet you; he'd like to meet anyone who might advance his churchly ambitions or share his taste for erotic poetry.

Finally there's that mystery man near the door, looking up as he absently sketches a woman's face on a scrap of paper. With his soft skin, plush lips and expression just on the edge of a frown, he's hard to read, a little secretive, maybe evasive, though he looks familiar. His face and the child's are a lot alike.

Some of these people we know by name; the identities of others we can only guess. All belong to the local elite, and at least a few to the Medici court. The mystery man is Alessandro de' Medici, the first duke of Florence, seen here both in a portrait owned by the Philadelphia Museum and in a head-shot oil study for a painting from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alessandro, rumored to be the illegitimate child of a Medici pope, Clement VII, and a serving woman, ruled Florence only briefly. A voracious womanizer, he was killed during an assignation. He was succeeded by his cousin, Cosimo I, whose mother, Maria Salviati, took charge of the dead man's three young children. She is the older woman in Pontormo's portrait, probably shown with Alessandro's daughter, Giulia.

No one fretted more about the prestige of the Medici name than Cosimo I. He was prepared to spend a mint on creating a dynastic advertising campaign through art, and specifically through portraiture. Pontormo's late approach to the genre, complex and empathetic, was not really suited to the task. Bronzino's work, with its machine-tooled balance of tact and novelty, refinement and corporate flair, was. And indeed, the difference between the two artists' views of the portrait - personal on the one hand, functional on the other - virtually defines the transformation suggested by the show's title. Unsurprisingly, Bronzino got the job.

Several of his people are, of course, at the Philadelphia party, too. Are they ever. One of them, a regal woman, a real madame-president type, sits center-stage in a scarlet gown with a tiny pet dog on her lap. She's sensational. For sheer shock value, though, no picture rivals Bronzino's image of a flush-faced teenage musician wearing next to nothing and suggestively fondling the bow of his viol.

In fact, this is his first portrait of Cosimo I, probably done on the eve of the duke's marriage. Intriguingly, the artist casts his new patron in the role of the beast-taming Orpheus, a mythological figure associated with marital fidelity.Cosimo liked the picture. Bronzino's career at court was secured, and the many portraits he went on to produce there represent Mannerism at its most polished and accessible.

Bronzino was a brilliant professional, a reliable showman who could be counted on to idealize even the least attractive client's features and then take decorative liberties with everything else: clothing, jewelry, furniture. He made the bourgeois rich look royal and smart. It was a winning game.

Pontormo, by contrast, was unreliable, mercurial and, one senses even without Vasari's description, emotion-driven and fundamentally private, which is not the same thing as crazy. All of this comes through in the 20 drawings that form the expressive soul of the Philadelphia show, organized by Carl Brandon Strehlke, adjunct curator of the museum's John. G. Johnson collection.

Only two are by Bronzino. And one of these is a black chalk portrait of Pontormo. The older artist was around 40 when the drawing was done. He is dressed in studio work clothes but conveys an air of patrician grace, an all-purpose effect Bronzino had more or less patented for court commissions. It's a good picture, crisply executed, minutely observed, if expressively noncommittal. It is also very different in every way from the drawings by Pontormo that surround it, among them two self-portraits.

The earlier one is dated 1525, when Pontormo was 31. He depicts himself almost full length reflected in a mirror. He stands in three-quarters profile, stripped to his underpants, a quizzical look on his face, and one hand, index finger extended, pointing straight out at the viewer, or, rather, at his reflected self. It's a witty, fantastically virtuosic and self-confident image. He not only draws like an angel, but he looks like a strapping young god, a Narcissus, a John the Baptist, a rap star playing to the camera. He's hot.

Then, from just a few years later, comes a self-image utterly unlike the first. Bust-length, it could even be of another person altogether, slight, androgynous, a bearded boy, his head tilted to one side, his features slack, his eyes unfocused, as if he were exhausted or ill or idiotic, a holy fool.

This is a study for the self-portrait that Pontormo inserted in one of his greatest religious paintings, the altarpiece of "The Deposition" in Santa Felicita in Florence. You can see it there still, and you won't forget it once you do, with its grieving figures in nursery-color clothes - pink and blue - floating like so many cushioning blankets around the dead Christ. And there's Pontormo's face, small and rapt, in the background. He's not really looking at what's going on, though. He's in his own world, where this and other things, tender, trivial and tremendous, are happening. In the drawings gathered in Philadelphia, you get a taste of that world, and of an artist who is perversely human and crazy like a saint.

"Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence" is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, through Feb. 13.

Photos: From an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Bronzino's "Portrait of a Lady"
Pontormo's "Alessandro de' Medici"

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