Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [67]
But where to? Michelangelo lived on into the mid-1560s, and the Renaissance lived on with him. Had it anything more to say after his glory years? The answer must be “A great deal,” and in two important respects. Michelangelo was a realist in that he drew the human shape from actual bodies with a high degree of truth to nature. But he also sought to idealize, to present human figures in their superlative ripeness, on the very verge of apotheosis. To him, the assertion that man was made in God’s image was not a symbolic truism but the simple truth.
Other painters saw humanity differently, and they asserted the right to contribute their own offerings to the pool of visual perception. Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1557) was a product of Andrea del Sarto’s Florentine shop and was brought up to paint the ideal or the normative. But he saw people differently, or rather they had their own peculiar faces and expressions that were normative to him. This is not so disturbing in his mythological works, which can be delightful—the fresco Vertumnus and Pomona, which he did around a lunette in the grand salon of the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, is one of the most blissful entertainments of the Renaissance, though thought-provoking on close inspection. But his sacred scenes invite comparison with the established versions, and the results are worrying. In his Visitation (Santissima Annunziata, Florence) three holy ladies are closely grouped in swirling unity, an indelible image. The bigger group of the Deposition in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence is also enmeshed. It is beautiful and moving; the faces are tender and sorrowful, the colors radiant—he took the high colors of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling and made them glow—but it is not natural. Pontormo’s figures are not located in space. Their eyes are deep-set and often upright ovals. These figures are not real. They are creatures of Pontormo’s imagination.
His fellow pupil in Andrea’s shop Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540) showed a similar itch to get into a different world of his own. His great oil on panel, The Deposition (Volterra), is a fantastic composition, elegantly conceived and tenderly painted, but bears no relation to what actually happened. The setting is abstract, the faces are peculiar though quite different from Pontormo’s, the bodies are whimsical. It is Rosso’s way of seeing things, his maniera. These languid and strange reactions to the hyperactive energy of Michelangelo and the self-confident serenity of Raphael would in a different context—say, the nineteenth century—be described as decadence. Art experts used the term Mannerism, a confusing label that no one can define.
These painters could be peculiar, Pontormo especially. He was a recluse to the point of hermitry. He built for himself an upper-room studio to which the only access was a ladder and, having stocked it with food and water, would pull the ladder up after himself. Even his favorite pupil, Agnolo Bronzino (1503–72), was sometimes denied access or even a response when he howled up his greetings. The pupil was more “normal” than the master and became the most successful painter of his generation, at least in Florence. He was court artist to the Medici dukes and painted fashionable society portraits for thirty years. His draftsmanship was superb, his finish spectacularly lucid and transparent, the garments he put on his subjects were gorgeous, but his flesh tones were light and chilly. He froze faces in time and paint and made them peer out at us through an ice age. The rich of his age, which coincided with the ravages of the Reformation and the early religious wars, seem stiff, inhuman, armored, bloodless. But they liked being seen that way, and now, again, we like to see them thus, so Bronzino is popular once more. Moreover, he could show a different side. His oil in London’s National Gallery, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, whatever it is supposed