Pontormo

Jacopo Carucci was born May 24, 1494, and took the name Pontormo from his birthplace near Florence. He came up through the Florentine School but broke sharply with its perspectival certainty, pushing into Mannerism when that shift was neither safe nor expected. His paintings abandoned stable ground: bodies coil and suspend in ambiguous space, poses twining into one another, perspective collapsing into something dreamlike and vertiginous. The work marked a profound stylistic rupture from the Renaissance regularity that had defined his training. He died January 2, 1557, having spent three decade…