The Deposition from the Cross (Pontormo)

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The Entombment
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 Jacopo Pontormo's oil on wood painting, located at the altar of the Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita, 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) in the church of San Michele e Francesco at Carmignano almost appears to quote the clothing of the three graces; the contrapposto of the figures can be compared to Pontormo's Annunciation (1520s) frescoed on adjacent columns.

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

[edit] Interpretation

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 the burden of sin Christ took on) and of their grief. No Cross is visible; the natural 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. Their 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 apoplectic 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 architecturally integrated. 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, although he remains less well known than 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 phantasmagorical and gymnastically challenged array in his Descent from the Cross (1521) or in the crowded Deposition from the Cross.

[edit] Other works

The Deposition from the Cross is one of the standard scenes from the life of Jesus in medieval art, and because of the complexities of the composition, it is one in which Renaissance artists continued to take a great interest. Contrast the grieving crowds and brightness of color in this deposition to Caravaggio's Deposition from the Cross or Entombment [6] in the Vatican Pinacoteca [7]. The Deposition by Raphael in the Galleria Borghese really shows a later scene, the Entombment of Christ.