Jacopo Pontormo

Jacopo Pontormo was a Florentine painter and a founder of Mannerism, whose work abandoned High Renaissance balance for elongated bodies, acid colour and unstable space. Born Jacopo Carrucci at Pontorme near Empoli in 1494, he was orphaned early and moved to Florence, where he passed through the workshops of Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo and Andrea del Sarto. Michelangelo is reported to have said of him that this young man will carry the art of painting to the heavens. His early work followed del Sarto closely, but by the 1520s he had broken with the classical settlement that Raphael and Fra Bartolomeo represented. The Deposition from the Cross, painted for the Capponi Chapel in Santa Felicita around 1525-28, is the central work. It has no cross, no visible ground and no clear light source; ten figures in pink, acid green and pale blue are packed into a space that gives them nothing to stand on, and the composition spirals rather than resolving into a pyramid. It is one of the works that defines the style. He painted the frescoes at the Certosa del Galluzzo in 1523-25, taking refuge there from plague, and drew on Dürer's woodcuts — a northern influence Vasari disapproved of. His portraits, including the Halberdier, are among the most psychologically acute of the century. Vasari describes him as solitary and fearful, living in a house whose upper room he reached by a ladder that he pulled up behind him. His late diary records his meals, his bowels and his anxieties in obsessive detail. He spent his last eleven years on frescoes for San Lorenzo, destroyed in the eighteenth century. He died in 1557.

• Lived: 1494 CE – 1557 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter