Following an electronic discussion with a friend in Italy - who lives incidentally at Empoli, through which passes the river Orme, whence the name of the Mannerist painter Pontormo - and the subsequent watching of some videos about the Visitation by Pontormo, and especially in one of those, the excellent lecture given by Bruce Edelstein at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in New York, I decided to write down a few thoughts concerning that picture.
The Visitation, oil on panel, 1528-30 by Pontormo (born Jacopo Carucci, 1494-1556)
San Michele Arcangelo, Carmignano
Image: Public Domain at Wikipedia and courtesy of the Parish of San Michele Arcangelo, Carmignano.
My friend had sent me a photo of a detail from Pontormo's painting, which is to be found in the small town of Carmignano, a detail of two small figures in the distant background; our discussion originated there, concerning what exactly the figures were doing. There followed from my friend a couple of links to other discussions about this same work, including its recent (2014) restoration. On watching these videos, one of which was the aforementioned lecture given in 2018 by Bruce Edelstein, I was prompted to do some research of my own.
The direct stimulus for the research was the reference to the influence of the prints of Albrecht Dürer on Florentine artists generally and on Pontormo in particular, at the beginning of the 16th century. These prints found their way into many areas of Europe and especially into Italy and Florence, in large part due to the entrepreneurial skills of Dürer himself. This reference in relation to Pontormo was not new as art historians have for many years - in fact, going back as far as the 1568 edition of Vasari's Lives - remarked on the clear influence of those prints; not only Bruce Edelstein but, amongst others, Carlo Falciani for example and Attilio Brilli1, have made the connection between the Visitation and one Dürer print in particular, the Four Witches of 1497.
The Four Witches, engraving, 1497 by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Felton Bequest, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Image: courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria
As we can see from the image above, there are four nude women standing together in a circle, two more or less with their backs to us, and two facing outwards, although only one is entirely visible, the other being substantially hidden by two of her companions. First we might note that none is clothed (hence nude!), a not unimportant detail when comparing this image with the Visitation; secondly, that none is apparently pregnant, a salient point regarding the raison d'être behind the subject of the Pontormo picture2. What seem to have interested historians about this image are the generous proportions of the woman in the centre with her back fully to us, this element being often cited as the source for the so-called rhomboid-shapes3 of the women in Pontormo's painting. In my opinion, ignoring the Biblical fact that the two women were pregnant at the time of the visit (hence the 'rhomboid' shapes), the presence of that partially-hidden woman who is - almost - looking out at the viewer, and the compositional idea of four women together, would have been enough to have stimulated Pontormo. What I would like to draw attention to is another quite different print by Dürer but one with exactly the same subject as Pontormo's picture, that is, the visit of the Virgin Mary to Saint Elizabeth, both at that time pregnant.
The Visitation, woodcut, 1503-04 by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Felton Bequest, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Image: courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria
In this print there is a number of happy coincidences with Pontormo's Visitation. Beginning at the left side we see a large building with an arched gateway or door and, running along the base of the outside wall, a kind of seat or bench. In Pontormo's picture, albeit somewhat in the background (on the left) is a similar building with a similar bench on which are sitting the two small figures mentioned above. The building incidentally, is drawn in sharply receding perspective - as is that on the left of the Dürer. The next feature which I think points to this print as a possible 'influence' on Pontormo is the two figures of Mary and Saint Elizabeth in the centre of the image; here we see the two women greeting one another, this time with Mary on the right. Both are somewhat largish in the belly region, they are looking directly at each other, and interestingly, touching each other on the shoulder (an obvious gesture in the painting), or, at least, Mary definitely has her left hand on Elizabeth's right shoulder and appears to have her other hand on the older woman's left shoulder. Elizabeth's hands seem to be obscured by Mary's arms but she is apparently clasping her under her raised arms. The four Witches on the other hand are not making visible contact with one another!
In Dürer's Visitation the position of the two principal actors is reversed and there are no attendant ladies in that central group, as in Pontormo's picture but, in my opinion, the similarities here are much closer than those said to pertain in the Four Witches print. In Dürer's Visitation, Elizabeth is seen from the back, a quasi-three-quarter view, a similar view to that of Mary in Pontormo's painting. As far as the two Elizabeths are concerned, there is an interesting coincidence in the very obvious sharp angle formed in the painting by her backward left leg and the way it pulls her yellow garment: in the print, an analogous angle is created by Elizabeth's folded-back outer garment.
There are numerous differences between the two works as well, the most obvious being the number of principal actors (two in the print, four in the painting); the 'Mannerist' composition of the painting (that is, that the figures occupy nearly all the image surface); the stark difference in scale between the figures and the background in the painting, whereas the composition and relative scale of figures and background are 'normal' (pre-Mannerist) in the print; the print version has the meeting set in the countryside, while Pontormo's encounter would seem to be in an urban environment; and so on - not to mention the obvious, that the Dürer is monochrome while the Pontormo is coloured!
In general terms then, how can we describe the undoubted influence of the German master's printed oeuvre on a Florentine Mannerist painter such as Jacopo Pontormo? Although Dürer was also a painter and an art theorist, he is known now, and was then, principally for his graphic output, in his case enough on its own to qualify him as one of the great artists of the time. Many of his prints were in fact produced with the aim of their forming part of a book (usually a printed book, occasionally a manuscript book), whether, as initially, published by others or, later, published by himself. As indicated, Dürer was entrepreneurial in his outlook and deliberately worked at the diffusion of his printed works, and in this he was particularly successful in Florence at the end of the 1400s and the beginning of the 1500s.
On an earlier occasion, when Pontormo was at the Certosa (a Carthusian monastery) at Galluzzo, just outside Florence, to which he had retired due to an outbreak of the plague in that city, when he came to decorate the cloister there with a fresco cycle based on the Passion of Christ, he resorted to using some of the German master's images as more or less direct sources for his own compositions. The frescos at the Certosa, although restored, have clearly suffered a great deal in the intervening centuries; this is most especially evident in the colours and this is significant because they are paintings (which generally implies colour) and not monochrome, such as many prints happen to be4. A deteriorated painting, that is, one where the visual integrity of the colour has been severely compromised (as is the case at Galluzzo), has rather the look coincidentally of a lightly-tinted print as opposed to a lately-completed painting.
The images of the Passion painted by Pontormo at the Certosa are crowded with figures (as are Dürer's scenes of the same subject), many of which are soldiers dressed in the contemporary German manner (as is also the case in Dürer's prints)5. While Pontormo's composition (the basic 'V' shape as a structural scaffolding) and even some of its content, such as the German-style of the soldiers, can be traced to Dürer's series of prints dealing with the same subject, in his (Pontormo's) painting of Christ before Pilate, the management of the clothing for instance, would seem to be much more 'Tuscan' than the somewhat Gothic quality in the prints. In that same scene - whose setting is quite different from, for instance a Dürer print of 1509 from the Little Passion series, showing Christ before Herod - there is in the top of the background, the figure of a youth apparently descending a central staircase, and carrying the basin of water in which Pilate will later wash his hands of the responsibility for Christ's death. The inclusion of this figure and the staircase (not to mention the colour) is an example of Pontormo's independence of his source material, and I mention it only to point out that he was not entirely reliant on prints from across the Alps.
The aspect of the handling of garments is an important one I think as, again, it demonstrates that while Pontormo was happy to borrow certain elements of the German master's work, he was in other respects too advanced - in a Tuscan 'disegno' way - to adopt it uncritically. This is true as well, and particularly, in his Visitation, where the painting of the clothing of the principal characters is wholly his own, or, perhaps better, Florentine; moreover, as others have noted, it reflects his treatment of the clothes in the sublime fresco of the Annunciation and in the panel of the Deposition in the Capponi Chapel of Santa Felicita. On the other hand, Dürer's treatment of cloth in his prints is always medieval or Gothic, with its characteristic small twists in the ends and folds of drapery; this quality, which might otherwise be ascribed to wood carving and to other reminiscences of medieval illustration, obviously did not attract the draughtsman in Pontormo.
Actually, there are many differences between the work of Pontormo and Dürer. Although the latter was also a painter, and both were consummate drawers, there is a world - the antique world - separating them. Pontormo's work is post-Renaissance, having already mastered all the developments of the previous century, and having already moved in a new, revolutionary direction. His drawing by this stage, like his colour, is derived from Michelangelo and his composition is the antithesis of Renaissance equilibrium. He, like Michelangelo, particularly in the Capponi Chapel and in the Visitation, has almost completely done away with 'setting', the figures are massive, the colours sublime.
Dürer's printed work to a large extent, although revealing his mastery of some Italian developments, such as perspective, still contains elements which are quasi-Medieval, for instance as mentioned, in the way he handles drapery and clothes. But one feature which explicitly differentiates the two masters is Dürer's inclusion of beautiful anecdotal details, of which there are many in his prints. His Visitation is a case in point: the meeting is set in a landscape complete with rocks, mountains, trees of various kinds, clouds in the sky, a distant town or castle, not to mention a pet dog! Elizabeth even has the house-hold keys and a purse (?) hanging from her side. The figures are shown in the conventional physical relation to their surroundings, to the space they occupy; Dürer's religious figures and environments are therefore identifiable by the 'man in the street'.
Much of Pontormo's work is staged on another plane, a plane which requires no stage! His scenes, those without a clear setting anyway, happen on the wall or panel in such a way that they 'occur' in the viewer's mind. His Visitation is, to all intents and purposes, totally devoid of ordinary mundane anecdote, except for the two men seated on the bench in the distant left; so curious is this detail that one is inclined to think there must be a pertinent significance to their presence, as yet not decoded. Of course, their inclusion could simply be anecdotal in fact, like the ass's head protruding around the corner of that left-hand building: a kind of comic philosophical comment on the incomprehension of so much that happens in the world. Not all Dürer's prints were of religious subjects and his less didactic but more mysterious engravings and woodcuts are full of wonderful invention (for example, Melencolia 1, Nemesis, The Four Witches, the portraits). In a sense, as far as their religious works are concerned, Dürer explains while Pontormo dreams.
1 Pontormo e Rosso Fiorentino: Divergenti Vie della "Maniera", catalogue published by Mandragora on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition held at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in 2014: Carlo Falciani, Giovanni Maria Fara and Antonio Geremicca all contributed articles in which the influence of Dürer's prints was discussed.
Attilio Brilli in Itinerari del Manierismo in Toscana (Silvana Editoriale, 1994) also discusses this influence. Numerous other authors stress the influence of prints made by northern artists, that is, from artists who lived beyond the Alps (Germany, Flanders, etc.); Alessandro Cecchi, Antonio Natali and Carlo Sisi for example, in the excellent catalogue (published by Marsilio) to the exhibition L'Officina della Maniera, held in Florence at the Uffizi in 1996-97.
2 According to Saint Luke's Gospel (1, 36-44) both the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth were miraculously pregnant at the same time; Mary went to visit her older cousin who was eventually to give birth to a son, later known as John the Baptist.
3 Most art historical analysis of Pontormo's Visitation notes the so-called 'rhomboid' shapes of the two principal actors, Mary and Elizabeth, and duly traces that shape back to the Four Witches print; we might notice that, in the first place, the Witches in Dürer's print are not pregnant and neither are they particularly 'rhomboid' in form. In the second place, as mentioned, the event of the Visitation occurred when both protagonists were pregnant, possibly giving rise, one would have thought, to a characteristic shape: surely Pontormo hardly needed to seek inspiration for that! As suggested here, what seems more likely to have attracted his creative attention was the fact of four women standing together and the partial appearance of the one (almost) looking out at us. An example incidentally, of how artists may 'borrow' something from another's work but then proceed to adjust it for their own purposes. One might also point out in this context the pre-existing 'rhomboid-shape' of the large female figure in pink, directed away from the viewer and towards Mary, in Pontormo's Deposition panel in Sta Felicita, which was painted between 1525-28 - that is, before the Visitation.
4 One very interesting and beautiful example however of monochrome painting is the fresco cycle depicting the Life of Saint John the Baptist, painted by Andrea del Sarto between 1508 and 1526, in the Chiostro dello Scalzo in Florence. It will be remembered that Andrea del Sarto was one of Pontormo's masters but also incidentally, as Vasari tells us, that when working in the Scalzo, Andrea took inspiration from the prints of Dürer.
5 This is interesting in both cases, that is, in the case of Pontormo and Dürer, since the normal representation of the Passion of Christ is with (ancient) Roman soldiers as the attendant guards. Dürer may have wanted to 'update' so to speak his image, to make the scenes more accessible by clothing his characters in contemporary garb; this was done by Italian artists too. In fact, both artists have used contemporary buildings as part of the setting although Pontormo has clothed his figures in what passes for 1st century AD dress. However, Pontormo's adoption of the Landsknechte-type of soldier, in Florence, is puzzling. He may simply have liked the look of these fearsome German soldiers from an artistic or visual novelty point of view, and so kept them in his pictures as he adapted Dürer's images. However, one wonders if perhaps there may not have been a political aspect to his use of uniquely Germanic soldiers, soldiers who, in his pictures, will eventually put the Saviour to death. Although it was to occur roughly two years later, in 1527, the tragedy of the Sack of Rome was carried out by precisely this type of soldier, the Landsknechte, together with Spanish and some Italian mercenary troops. The mutinous Germanic part of the forces which attacked Rome and, more specifically the papacy, were representatives of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, a German prince. The problems between the papacy and the Emperor are complex, the two parties being sometimes on the same side, sometimes on the opposite. In this context, although before the Sack itself, it was not unusual for local enemies to be portrayed as the villains in religious works; in the present case, this is mere speculation however!
