Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier (Getty Museum Studies on Art)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier (Getty Museum Studies on Art) Details
Much has been written about the identity of the sitter in this portrait. In 1568, Vasari noted that Pontormo painted a beautiful work, a portrait of Francesco Guardi. In 1612, however, the name of Cosimo i de' Medici was attached to a description of the portrait. In this volume, Cropper argues that the subject of the painting is indeed Francesco Guardi. She discusses not only the specific determination of the sitter but the tools and methods used in general for establishing the people and places portrayed in works of art.
Reviews
This is a volume in the series “Getty Museum Studies on Art,” the avowed purpose of which is to illuminate significant works of art and put them into a broad historical and cultural context and to convey a sense of the range of approaches taken by art historians in the analysis of works from vastly different artistic environments and historical eras. Pontormo’s “Portrait of a Halberdier” is an excellent candidate for such an examination, and Elizabeth Cropper is just about the best examiner of the painting that one could hope for. Although when it was painted, there was of course no question about its date or author, its subject, purpose, or commissioner, etc., all that background was lost to history in the course of its centuries-long existence and only started to be recovered in the twentieth century. Not until 1920 was it definitively identified as by Pontormo rather than by Giovanni Francesco Penni or some other Florentine painter to whom it had been previously attributed. But when was it painted? who sat for it? why was it commissioned? is it in fact a real portrait or possibly an idealized figure?—these and similar questions have remained open and the subject of scholarly debate ever since and are the topics addressed in the monograph. Elizabeth Cropper has been for some time a professor of art history at John Hopkins University, is past President of the Renaissance Society of America and Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington. Although she has written on a range of subjects, she is one of the most distinguished historians of Italian Renaissance art and has made something of a specialty of portraiture; most recently, she contributed the section on Pontormo’s and Rosso’s portraits in the catalogue of the great “Diverging Paths of Mannerism” exhibition of those two artists at the Palazzo Strozzi in the summer of 2014 (which, unfortunately, did not include the “Halberdier”). In addition, she has demonstrated particular skills as an art historical sleuth in her fascinating book on “The Domenichino Affair” (2005), in which she analyzed the famous incident when the Bolognese painter Domenico Zampieri, “Domenichino” (1581-1641), was accused by his rival Giovanni Lanfranco of having “stolen” the idea for his great altarpiece “The Last Communion of St. Jerome” (1614) from Lanfranco’s teacher, Agostino Caracci. How one can “steal” the idea for a painting at a time when notions of originality were fluid at best, and when emulation or imitation was truly a sincere form of flattery and when all painters were looking over one another’s shoulders and traveling around to see each other’s latest works—and why precisely Domenichino should have been so rudely accused—these are all questions that Dr. Cropper addressed in an engaging and entertaining and superbly informative way. The Pontormo book proceeds similarly, presenting and evaluating conflicting evidence, exploding untenable hypotheses, threading its way through antithetical claims. At bottom is the basic issue of identity: is this young man Francesco Guardi who, according to Vasari’s 1568 account, was painted by Pontormo “at the time of the siege of Florence”; or is it, according to an attribution of 1612, rather a portrait of the young Cosimo I de’ Medici? Each side has its stalwart partisans, and all manner of evidence has been deployed in support of their positions.Dr. Cropper believes it is Guardi, and she marshals a great amount of social and historical information and artistic analysis to buttress her opinion. In doing so, she has made the full argument on that side for the first time, and yet, as she readily concedes, she has not provided a detailed refutation of all the claims of the other side, which “would fill another book” (10). To organize her discussion, Dr. Cropper has simply taken Vasari’s short statement about the portrait in his “Lives” and followed it phrase by phrase and taken other aspects into consideration as she goes. Thus the mention of the siege of Florence leads to elaborations of what that campaign was all about, the forces of the Florentine patriots defending their city against the besieging army of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, the role of the Popes and Medici loyalists, etc., indeed, the entire political situation of Northern Italy at the time. That leads to subsidiary discussions of Michelangelo’s positions and his design of the fortifications of the city, of the importance to the defense of the class of the “bella gioventù,” the “beautiful youth” of the city, and of Pontormo’s own political stance, etc. When Vasari speaks of “the costume of a soldier,” the discussion goes to an explication of the halberdier’s weapon and clothing and especially of his hat badge with its portrayal of Hercules and Antaeus (subsidiary: that particular myth and its iconography and its importance to Florence), and his mention that Bronzino painted a cover for the portrait representing Pygmalion praying to Venus opens up even more areas for investigation. By the time we are done with our identification of the figure, we have considered issues of physical likeness, political reality, artistic influence, chronology, costume, symbolic meaning and much more, and we have become familiar with the circumstances of several generations of the Guardi del Monte clan and followed their fortunes in peacetime and war. The book is quite well illustrated with a variety of images including several full-page reproductions of major Pontormo works, comparison illustrations, and maps and photographs of sites in and around Florence. Of course, all of this examination is not simply for the purpose of identifying the subject; the issue is more one “of radically different and incompatible interpretations” of the image, for “how we identify the sitter alters our view of those times” (9). That is finally the goal of the author’s explication, for which we need to know who is painted: Is it young Cosimo, whose installation as Duke of Tuscany by the victorious Charles V will institute a two-hundred-year Medici hegemony in Florence, for better or for worse? Or is it young Francesco standing futile watch over the republican values of a doomed experiment in self-governance? There is evidence on both sides. Dr. Cropper admits that her arguments sometimes seem “like presentations made in a court of law” (2), and if that is so, it is not like a criminal case, where what is wanted is proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, but more like a civil procedure, where what counts is the preponderance of evidence. This book is weighty evidence in favor of the Guardi side, although I must say it would have been equally fascinating had it come out the other way. There is copious annotation, a good selected bibliography, a multigenerational genealogical chart of the Guardi family, and a convenient foldout of the painting. “Who is it?” is here easily as compelling as “Who done it?” Warmly recommended for all enthusiasts of late Renaissance painting and especially of that in Florence.