In a Little Church by the Old Bridge

Our apartment was on a narrow, cobbled street that wound downhill from Forte Belvedere to a small piazza at the southern end of the Ponte Vecchio – the Oltrarno end, as the Florentines call it.  It was our first time in Florence, and every morning my wife and I set out downhill, eager to cross the Arno and get to all the exciting places in the centro storico: the Uffizi, of course, and the Bargello for its sculptures, as well as the Piazza Signoria, the Duomo, and the Mercato Centrale to buy pasta and sauce to reheat for dinner in our miniscule angolo cottura.

We rarely even noticed the rather plain church occupying the east side of the piazza; and anyway, the porch, behind three arches, was guarded by a tall iron fence, whose gate was usually closed.  So we simply hurried by.

One morning, though, I saw that the iron gate was open; and, looking more carefully, I noticed that the porch was topped by a gallery with windows, carried by arches beyond the church façade, and across the piazza.  I suddenly realized that it was a section of the famous Vasari Corridor, the elevated passageway between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Pitti Palace that Giorgio Vasari built for Duke Cosimo I.  We were curious, of course, so in we went.

The church was empty and dimly lit.  Next to the first chapel on the right was a metal box with a slot for euros.  By now, we knew what that meant – something worth lighting!  The euro dropped.  I’d been expecting another murky Madonna or gruesome martyrdom; instead, in the sudden illumination, I was face-to-face with a large painting so incandescently luminous, so strangely coloured, and so outlandishly composed that I took an involuntary step backward.

Mary was there, to be sure, swooning with grief as Christ’s lifeless body is supported by two young men with angelic faces.  One, apparently bearing most of the weight, is crouching, impossibly balanced on his toes. Indeed, his bare torso appears to have turned plum-pink with the effort.  Surrounding these figures is a group of grieving women, some dressed, like Mary, in silken robes of sky-blue.  Others are draped in flowing violet, coral-pink, orange, or dark green. A mysterious, acid-green bundle of cloth, perhaps representing a shroud, twines among the figures.

My first thought was that the scene was the Deposition, when Jesus is taken down from the cross.  But there is no cross in the composition; in fact, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything besides the figures.  There is a suggestion of an undefined, brownish surface upon which the two young men precariously stand, and a small cloud in a grey sky.  All the brightly clad mourners seem to float in a shallow, chaotic, crowded space undefined by perspective.

And yet, the more I stared, and the more euros I deposited, the more I felt the power of the work.  Bizarre it might be, but it is beautifully painted.  The mourners, crowded into their small, painted universe, seem to gaze at us with shocked and silent anguish, as if they are trapped in a nightmare behind the picture plane.  I have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of paintings since, and I don’t know of a more convincing evocation of inexpressible grief.  As I was to discover later, the painting is now considered a masterpiece, and one of the most important early mannerist works.

The painter, it turned out, was Jacopo da Pontormo, who spent three years decorating the Capponi Chapel in the Church of Santa Felicita.  In 1528, he finished the commission, which included a frescoed Annunciation on the right-side chapel wall, four trompe l'oeil roundels of the Evangelists, and the Deposition (if that’s what it is).

Who was Jacopo da Pontormo?  Well, the biographical information – born Jacopo Carucci in the Tuscan town of Pontormo in 1494, studied with Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto, worked mostly in Florence, died 1557 – is important, but I wanted the contemporary viewpoint.  And who better to provide it than the man who designed the corridor that rides the portico of the church:  that excellent architect, mediocre painter, and the first great art historian – Giorgio Vasari?

In his Life of Jacopo da Pontormo, it’s clear that Giorgio, who was 17 years younger than Pontormo, liked and respected the older artist; but Vasari could not understand how such a brilliant painter could stray so far from the hard-won advances of the Renaissance.  He thought it must be the pernicious influence of “German” artists from northern Europe.  He also noted that Jacopo was far too solitary and secretive: “… all the time that he was executing this work he would never allow even the owner of the chapel himself to see it, insomuch that, having painted it after his own fancy, without any of his friends having been able to give him a single hint, when it was finally uncovered and seen, it amazed all Florence.”

The amazement Vasari described was perhaps not entirely positive.  But the painting has retained its amazing power to move us for nearly 500 years.  

Text © 2018 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2018 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Magazine, February 2018