For an artist as remarkable as the Florentine painter Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1557), it is no surprise that books continue to be published about him and his work, and that contrasting points of view can coexist. Jessica Maratsos's study aims to counter the tendency in Pontormo studies to attribute his unique works to some sort of hyper-personal psychological or character type, or, alternatively, to see him as a victim of a changing religious-social landscape that he was too dim to recognize in time to alter his artistic approach. Instead, she finds multiple modes of expression—such as direct address, tactile evocation, and affective incitement, among others—in his religious paintings. After a review of the historiography of Mannerism, Maratsos pinpoints the weakness of several recent exhibitions that were determined to show Pontormo and his sometime rival Rosso Fiorentino as solely interested in creating a distinct personal style. Indeed, the focus on style advanced in seminal publications by John Shearman and Craig Hugh Smyth has estranged scholars from the content of Pontormo's religious images. After this introduction, in the following three chapters the author examines Pontormo's frescoes for the Certosa del Galluzzo, the altarpiece for the Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita, and the lost frescoes of the choir of San Lorenzo. In the first of these, the author analyzes Pontormo's derivations from the Passion prints of Dürer, correctly dismissing the notion that Pontormo's contemporaries would have seen the adaptations from these prints as references to the religious reform movements emanating from the north and Martin Luther himself. The author discusses the images as exempla of Pontormo's use of the interruptive gaze, arguing that in the huge courtyard at the Certosa and in the absence of a continuous system of frames to direct the viewer, stilled figures staring out at the viewer (to be understood as the Carthusian monks circumambulating in complete silence) disrupted the flow of the narrative, stopping the viewer and wrenching them out of a predictable role in relation to the image.
In the chapter on the Capponi Chapel, Maratsos considers arguments regarding the Paragone, divine images (acheiropoieta), and painting as an art of visual trickery. Following earlier scholars, Maratsos identifies the bearded male figure of Nicodemus at the far right of the altarpiece as a self-portrait of Pontormo. By the sixteenth century, Nicodemus was believed to have been a sculptor and was incorporated by both Michelangelo and Bandinelli in their own tomb sculptures. Her presentation of how Nicodemus operates within the Capponi altarpiece is fruitful, but the features of the man in the altarpiece do not look like Pontormo in his British Museum self-portrait drawing (1936-10-10-10v), which is contemporary with the Capponi Chapel decorations. In this drawing and in the Adoration of the Magi in the Pitti Gallery (in which Pontormo included himself in a group) he has an oblong, gaunt face, sunken cheeks, thick lips, a long, bony, hooked nose, and a high, squared-off forehead. In contrast, the face of Nicodemus in the altarpiece is rounded with plump cheeks, a tiny mouth, and a softly molded nose. Moreover, the comparison to the tombs of Michelangelo and Bandinelli is incongruous. Were this Pontormo's own funerary monument, he could have included a self-portrait. But in a commission from another family, when only a single figure, the man at the right, is not part of the sacred group, that man must be a member of the Capponi family.
Next, Maratsos assesses the possible connections of Pontormo's commission for the choir of San Lorenzo (1544–57) with the idea of justification by faith alone. She points out that these theories are untenable, as they either cite only selected passages or ignore the visual evidence of the paintings. In a slight contradiction that may have been missed in editing, in the chapter on Pontormo's legacy it is stated that the choir paintings lacked “any representation of the Virgin and any other intercessory saints” (156). However, in her chapter on the lost frescoes, Maratsos stipulates that the image of Saint Lawrence directly below that of Christ unequivocally functioned as an intercessory figure (125), thereby correctly concluding that Pontormo's frescoes could not have been explicitly heretical (151).
