Jacopo da Pontormo
Il Libro mio [My Book]
Edited by Salvatore S. Nigro
Costa e Nolan, 1984
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| Pontormo, The Deposition from the Cross Florence, Church of Santa Felicita |
[1] The manuscript "is catalogued in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (National Central Library) in Florence with the code Miscellanea Magliabechiana, Cl. VIII, num. 1490" (p. 98).
[2] The first fragment of the Diario (Diary) was published by Giovanni Gaye in his Carteggio inedito d’artisti... (Unpublished correspondence of artists…) of 1840. The Diario was later published in its entirety in 1916 by Frederick Mortimer Clapp, in the appendix to his monograph on Pontormo (Yale University Press, New Haven).
[3] Emilio Cecchi "rediscovered" the Diario in Italy and led it to a respectable editorial fortune, first with a famous article published in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera on 15th September 1942, then taking care of the first Italian edition in 1956. Cecchi indicate in the notes all variations with respect to the transcription done by Clapp.
[4] It should be said that Salvatore S. Nigro expresses many reservations regarding the transcription in the first edition. Cecchi would have not only incurred with specific, circumstantial errors. "The trouble is - writes Nigro - that the Cecchi version was "a «mistake» in itself" (p. 111). It must be said, more in general, that the Diario of Pontormo later became quite famous. Different editions (or re-issues) have followed. The Diario has then been brought up not only to talk about the concerns of the Mannerist painter, but more generally to evaluate the thesis (fascinating, but questionable) that to be a true artist one must also be afflicted by diseases of psychic character, more or less marked.
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| Jacopo da Pontormo, Halberdier Los Angeles, Getty Museum |
[5] The text of the review appeared in the Sunday Sole 24 Ore on 03/24/1985 is displayed below (the article - signed by Francesco Gallo - is taken from the Multimedia Library of Il Sole 24 Ore - Cd Rom Sunday Insert, Twenty Years 1983-2003 of ideas).
SUNDAY - Pontormo
The squalid and stingy existence of a great Mannerist
by Francesco Gallo
The Libro mio (The book of mine) by Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo, the Mannerist painter trained in the workshop of Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, Mariotto Albertinelli, Andrea del Sarto, and then influenced by the work of Dürer and Michelangelo, extends itself chronologically for two years: from 1554 to 1556. It is a series of meagre notations, on the working day, on the people met, on the diet followed. Sometimes, the notations are pure calendar notations (like simply Friday, Saturday or Sunday), without events that would make them feel like days of life. In truth, that of Pontormo was a very strange life, almost a hermitage in the land of painting, broken here and there by Bronzino, a former student and then a friend of him, a talented Mannerist painter too, who will be responsible to complete the frescoes in the choir chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence, after his sudden death on 1 January 1557.
The primacy of the pages in the Libro is attributed to the daily diet, diet with a single meal of a little bread, a little salad, and a little meat, at times meat of a genre which "even dogs would have not eaten."
He is better off when he goes to the house of Bronzino: "I dined with Bronzino, chicken and veal and I felt good." When he is alone, it is like a refrain: "I had dinner with one cabbage and with one pesce d’uovo [note of the translator: it is a still existing Italian regional recipe, an egg-based pancake, of the form of a fish, thereby called a ‘fish made of egg’]." He lived so, in the squalor of existence, among drawings, and then the transposition on the walls of Cain and Abel, Noah, Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, Christ in glory above the creation of Eve, reason for which he will be suspected of spiritualist heresy. Together with the consideration that their paints are "shameless" and not "proper for a church", this suspicion will lead to the decision taken in 1738 to scrape the frescoes, so that today only some preparatory works are left. Among headache, diarrhoea, fevers and dried figs, he writes: " ... and I made in one day the head of the figure above, in that position", or "on Monday I started that figure. like this" (and next to the text, he makes a sketch that draws the fundamental lines of the painting), and so across the entire notebook, every time he refers to the progression of the work). "On Tuesday I made the head, on Wednesday the torso."
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| Jacopo da Pontormo, Group of the Dead. Preparatory drawing for the St. Lorenzo frescoes |
He almost never washes himself, and often feels sick, at the stomach, at the teeth; and you never feel any echo of a laugh, and very rarely any smile of satisfaction.
No mention of jokes, so congenial to Florence’s soul, is. Only once he displays, without wanting, his Florentine spirit, in the invitation made to his pupil Battista, for a walk in the hills, with the prospect of a good dinner with a mutton, but get down to it, he serves the bones of a previous meal: a punishment for the sin of gluttony.
If – when viewed from inside, the life of Pontormo, the maximum Florentine painter between 1520 and 1540, is indeed not cheerful - seen from outside it appears to the limit of normality, even not to believe the rumours of his cohabitation, during the drafting of the Flood, with corpses dug up and soaked in water, so that they would swell and rid themselves so as to become perfect models.
He lives miserably, but not for poverty, and his visible stinginess – compared with the standard of living of Bramante or Sangallo, Giulio Romano or Rosso Fiorentino (with servants, greyhounds, horses, and silver) stands in a sinister way, obscuring his undoubted creative greatness. A conflict between art and life that ends up influencing the opinion of Vasari on last Pontormo, who moved from a "joyful accord with classical art" to a deviant "imitation of Dürer", and a "ruinous subordination to Michelangelo." A negative valuation which long weighed on Pontormo and the big mannerism uniting him with Bronzino, Rosso Fiorentino, Beccafumi, Parmigianino, Primaticcio, but now completely overcome in the restoration of his merit of having inaugurated the "modern manner", a merit already intuited by Vasari.
The Libro mio of Pontormo takes his name from the way in which Lorenzo Lotto called, around the same years, a book of "notes" and "memories". It returns to us in the critical edition of Salvatore Silvano Nigro, who has restored in all its melancholic charm, freeing it from distortions, mistakes and misinformation due to little or too much respect. Enrico Baj presents it with a speech from painter to painter, in a rejection of the diet but a listening to the advices on painting, in a psychological and cultural communality with the pluralism of styles of mannerism, all deriving from Pontormo. Tano and Antonio Brancato have admirably transcribed Pontormo’s sketches from the autograph, contributing to the philological rigor of the publication.
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