Jacques de Beaufort: highly attenuated

Monday, November 15, 2010

highly attenuated

The Visitation

4 comments:

thesecretlivesofcats said...: Bill Viola's interpretation of The Visitation was kind of amazing, and also sort of his undoing...or just his leap into the relentlessly operatic.; 6:03 PM
Jacques de Beaufort said...: don't know about Bill Viola. Not much into "video" art.

Pontormo IS of great interest to moi:

Critical assessment and legacy from the pedia:

Vasari's Life of Pontormo, depicts him as withdrawn and steeped in neurosis while at the center of the artists and patrons of his lifetime. This image of Pontormo has tended to color the popular conception of the artist, as seen in the film of Giovanni Fago, Pontormo, a heretical love. Fago portrays Pontormo as mired in a lonely and ultimately paranoid dedication to his final Last Judgment project, which he often kept shielded from onlookers. Yet as the art historian Elizabeth Pilliod has pointed out, Vasari was in fierce competition with the Pontormo/Bronzino workshop at the time when he was writing his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. This professional rivalry between the two bottegas could well have provided Vasari with ample motivation for running down the artistic lineage of his opponent for Medici patronage.

Perhaps as a result of Vasari's derision, or perhaps because of the vagaries of aesthetic taste, Potormo's work was quite out of fashion for several centuries. The fact that so much of his work has been lost or severely damaged is testament to this neglect, though he has received renewed attention by contemporary art historians. Indeed, between 1989 and 2002, Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier (at right), held the title of the world's most expensive painting by an Old Master.

Regardless as to the veracity of Vasari's account, it is certainly true that Pontormo's artistic idiosyncrasies produced a style that few were able (or willing) to imitate, with the exception of his closest pupil Bronzino. Bronzino's early work is so close to that of his teacher, that the authorship of several paintings from the 1520s and '30s are still under dispute—for example the four tondi containing the evangelists in the Capponi Chapel, and the Portrait of a Lady in Red now in Frankfurt.

Pontormo shares some of the mannerism of Rosso Fiorentino and of Parmigianino. In some ways he anticipated the Baroque as well as the tensions of El Greco. His eccentricities also resulted in an original sense of composition. At best, his compositions are cohesive. The figures in the Deposition, for example, appear to sustain each other: removal of any one of them would cause the edifice to collapse. In other works, as in the Joseph canvases, the crowding makes for a confusing pictorial melee. It is in the later drawings that we see a graceful fusion of bodies in a composition which includes the oval frame of Jesus in the Last Judgement.; 6:21 PM
thesecretlivesofcats said...: I might have been bringing it down a notch with that observation, but I'll stand by a lot of his early work. Video artists aren't much into us either. Go figure.

Good luck on the big project!; 7:10 PM
Jacques de Beaufort said...: Pontormo could probably paint my new series in an afternoon. at this rate it will take me 2 years. but I will soon have a new work to post.
Efflorescence.; 8:08 PM

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