Pontormo

           Jacopo Pontormo’s religious paintings are still a point of interest for intellects today, especially his work to the Capponi Chapel at the Church of Santa Felicitá. Pontormo does not simply illustrate Biblical scenes; he infuses his characters with blatant emotion. “At times, his characterizations become complex, detached, and even elusive; figures stare off from the limits of the picture plane and into the beholder’s space, their almond-shaped eyes adrift in distant wonderment,” says Josh Korenblat. Pontormo was at his dramatic apex when he did work for the Chapel. The altarpiece seems almost iconographic, following a continuing line of entombment scenes of Italian art.   

A circle of seemingly weightless youths hovers above Mary, as she recedes into the picture plane with the assistance of her servants. On the far right of the painting--somewhat in the distance despite the shallow pictorial space--stands Pontormo himself.   Transfixed in a wistful melancholy, gazing out to the beholder, he tilts his head slightly to the skies and upturns his lips into the hint of a smile. At the lower tier of the incongruously stacked composition, two youths attempt to bear the weight of Christ’s ungainly body--one even crouches below him in an attempt to support him with his shoulders. Yet Christ’s superhuman girth fails to rein in the attention of the two youths-- distraught, they stare left and right, and seem distracted from the monumental burden they share. In this way, Pontormo summons an uncanny tension between weight and weightlessness, between the odd aviary mourners--who rise up to paradise--and the inevitability of entombment. Through its arrangement, the altarpiece invokes the ever-whirling cycle of life and death.

Despite the religious and celestial theme of the painting, the altarpiece has a distinctly terrestrial feeling. Pontormo uses the examples of Raphael and especially Tintoretto by incorporating the chapel space as the physical end of the scene, but Pontormo pushes these boundaries beyond what his predecessors ever did.

 Shearman favors entombment and the chapel space as Pontormo’s focal points, but Steinberg shifts his vision higher, to the dome of the Capponi chapel and to the heavens. He believes and tries to prove this by differentiating the sway of the virgin from the traditional entombment pose, which reveals Pontormo’s repugnance to rhetoric. The choice to make Mary swoon is a direct model from Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s pietá.

            So does the dark tomb and the figures surrounding it suggest a downword, hellish momentum or an upward, heavenly momentum?  Steinberg argues that the surrounding figures negate a downward thrust, since the youths holding Christ do not look down or to the left and seem light on their toes, both indicating death. The drawing of God indicates that Pontormo sought the more ingrained emotions of the celestial father. In this way, Pontormo characterizes not only the suffering of Christ, but of the Capponi chapel itself. Ludovico Capponi commissioned Pontormo to paint the mausoleum space since he was anticipating his own death. Capponi imagined a "Throne of Grace", where God’s grace saves man from his sin.

            In the altarpiece “a whirlwind of figures spiral around an axis with a momentary, centripetal force--the figures neither bound to the earth nor fully enthroned in the sky,” states Korenblat. The best thing to do when analyzing Pontormo’s work is to accept the mysterious and neurosis complexity of his style. Throughout the image, Pontormo negates the conventional elements of an entombment scene. For a chapel infused with cold bodies in its sterile stone, only an altarpiece reflective of enlightened liberation, and not of death, seem appropriate. Pontormo did his work slowly and very subtly, so most likely his work is directed upward, toward the option of greater transcendence and implication. Pontormo made it this way so Ludovico Capponiand his family could rest in peace, with a visionary glance of salvation.