The Deposition from the Cross (Pontormo)

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Deposition from the Cross

Jacopo Pontormo, circa 1525–1528

oil on wood

313 × 192 cm

Santa Felicita di Firenze, Florence

The Deposition from the Cross [1] [2] (1528) is a masterpiece of Jacopo Pontormo painted with oil on wood for the altar of the Cappella Capponi in Santa Felicità in Florence. The decoration in the dome of the chapel is now lost, but four roundels with the Evangelists still adorn the pendentives, worked on by both Pontormo and Bronzino. The Visitation[3](1529) at Carmignano almost appears to quote the three graces in clothed fashion; the contrapposto of the figures can be compared to his Annunciation (152*) frescoed on adjacent columns.

This painting suggests a whorling dance of the able-bodied and grief-stricken. Pontormo's mannerist stylization restrains the mourning crowd. They inhabit a flattened, but sculptural congregation of brightly demarcated colors. The vortex of grief droops down towards the limp body of Jesus off center in the left. Those lowering Christ appear to demand our help in sustaining both the weight of his body and of their grief. No Cross is visible; the world itself is also appears to have nearly vanished, a lonely cloud and a shadowed ground with a crumpled sheet provide sky and stratum for the mourners. If the sky and earth have lost color, the mourners have not. The pleated clothes sag and droop, yet they have the bright and light Florentine colorful swathes of pink and blue that envelop the pallid limp Christ. Yet even this color does not evoke glee, but shock and emotion. Finally, the undulating contortions of Mannerism have meaning here; they appear like the apopleptic and uncontrolled spasms of melancholy. The Virgin, larger than her counterparts, swoons sideways inviting the support of those behind her. The assembly looks completely interlocked, as if you removed one person they would all fall. Legend has it that Pontormo set himself in self-portrait at the extreme right of the canvas; but ultimately, the most compelling and empathic figure is the crouching man in the foreground, whose expression mixes the weight of the cadaver and the weight of melancholy. He does not appear to know where to move.

Pontormo's stature has gained a measure of respect in recent decades; in part, he remains less well known compared to the superstars of Florentine High Renaissance. In part, his low popularity is because of the often melancholic and complicated tenor of his work. In part, it because his Florentine masterwork frescos, such as this, are not on canvas in the well-traversed by-ways for the Uffizi Gallery, but in a provincial church like Carmignano, the now generally-vacant Poggio a Caiano Medicean Villa, and this oft-ignored indistinct church of Santa Felicita is in Oltrarno district of Santo Spirito, a few steps from the Ponte Vecchio; its facade is spanned by the white Vasari corridor connecting the Pitti Palace with the Uffizi and Palazzo Vecchio. Multiple architects took part in frequent reconstructions. The Medici family could observe religious services from the "coretto" or private chapel in Vasari's Corridor[4], set over the portico on the facade [5].

The Florentine painter Rosso Fiorentino had painted a more phantamagorical and gymnastically challenged array in his Descent from the Cross (1521) or in the crowded Deposition from the Cross.

1 Other works
2 References
3 Map
4 Gallery of details from the painting

[edit] Other works

This deposition-lamentation event, central to Christianity, is commonly represented in European painting and sculpture [6]. Contrast the grieving crowds and brightness of color in this deposition, when compared to Caravaggio's Deposition from the Cross or Entombment [7] in the Vatican Pinacoteca [8]. Famous is also the Deposition by Raphael in the Galleria Borghese.