Rome is preparing to host, from October 9, 2026 to February 7, 2027, an event that fills a gap centuries old: the first major monographic exhibition dedicated to Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo. Curated by Cristina Acidini, the exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale promises to become a reference catalogue, finally capable of restoring the complexity of an artist who transformed restlessness into language.
There is a moment in the history of art when grace ceases to be balance and becomes tension. Pontormo is the poet of that instant. Trained in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, raised in the shadow of Leonardo and Michelangelo, he carried Florentine Renaissance beyond itself, toward a splendid and vertiginous territory: Mannerism. But the word maniera sounds cold for what happens on his canvases. Perhaps it is more accurate to speak of dismisura — an excess of pathos that bends bodies into unnatural spirals, distorts anatomies, sets colors ablaze with an unreal light.
Among the works on display, the Resurrection (1523–1525), a fresco from the Archdiocese of Florence, stands as one of the absolute pinnacles. Christ emerges from the tomb with an almost vegetal lightness, like a sprout breaking through stone. The soldiers sleep, wrapped in draperies that resemble dying flames. It is a resurrection without triumph — more a mystery than a victory.
The Supper at Emmaus (1525), oil on canvas from the Uffizi, captures the exact moment when the divine erupts into the everyday. The disciples recognize Christ in the breaking of bread, but Pontormo paints recognition as lightning: faces contort, hands open in gestures that no longer belong to this world. It is a domestic scene turned into vision.
And then there is the celebrated Portrait of a Halberdier (1529–1530), from the J. Paul Getty Museum. A young soldier grips his halberd, his gaze lost in a horizon only he can see. Pontormo renders the details of armor and fabric with almost hypnotic precision, but the subject’s soul escapes, withdraws, dwells elsewhere. It is a portrait that is also an absence.
Finally, the Visitation (1528–1532) from the Church of San Michele in Carmignano: two women meeting, greeting each other, but their bodies entwine in a cosmic dance, garments billow like sails, and everything seems to unfold in a suspended time, outside history. Elizabeth and Mary are no longer two biblical figures: they are the encounter itself, made flesh and color.
Pontormo died in 1557, alone, obsessed with the Last Judgment he was frescoing in the Certosa del Galluzzo — a work that time has not returned to us. Giorgio Vasari, his first biographer, painted an ambivalent portrait of him: brilliant and antisocial, locked in a room painting ghosts. But perhaps that seclusion was fidelity to a vision the world was not yet ready to understand.
Today, nearly five hundred years later, the Scuderie del Quirinale invite us to enter that room. To see, at last, through his eyes.
Photo credits: The Uffizi Gallery
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