(bright music)
- [Steven] We're in the church
of Santa Felicita in Florence.
We've just walked in the doorway and immediately
to the right is a small burial chapel.
- [Beth] This chapel belonged to the Capponi family
who acquired it in the 1520s.
- [Steven] And they soon hired the artist known as Pontormo
to produce its decorative cycle.
And this consists of a large altar painting,
four rondels, two frescoes on the wall
that abuts the facade and a painting in the dome
that no longer survives.
- [Beth] The altarpiece by Pontormo
has long baffled art historians.
- [Steven] The artist seems to have removed
all the stage props that are traditional
in paintings like this.
He's left us instead with the human body
and capacious cloth.
- [Beth] And one cloud.
- [Steven] That, and a little bit of steep ground
are the only hints that place these figures.
- [Beth] But, when we look at this painting in the 1520s,
we seem to have moved away from the Renaissance.
We don't have an illusion of space.
We don't have linear perspective or atmospheric perspective.
We don't have bodies that seem to be weighted on the ground.
- [Steven] Christ's torso is massive,
and yet he seems to be carried with no effort at all
by the attendant figure in blue just to his left.
- [Beth] And the figure below him
who's carrying most of his weight is balanced
on his tippy toes.
- [Steven] Absolutely impossible,
as impossible as his anatomy.
- [Beth] Pontormo is playing fast and loose
with human anatomy.
Something that had been so important
for Renaissance artists.
- [Steven] Look at his neck,
look at the length of his torso.
There is an exaggeration that seems
to be a kind of rejection of the clarity
of High Renaissance naturalism.
This painting is often seen as an exemplar
of the new mannerist style,
built on the naturalism of the High Renaissance,
but introducing a dance-like elegance.
- [Beth] Mannerism is the style that emerges
after the High Renaissance in the 1520s.
- [Steven] Unlike high Renaissance painting,
which looked to nature as its source,
mannerism and Pontormo seemed to be using art itself
as its source.
In that way, it's highly self-referential.
Pontormo's looking back to a Pieta by Botticelli,
a painting that likely influenced Michelangelo
in his own rendering of the sculpture, the Pieta.
And so, although this painting rejects
so many of the traditions of the Renaissance,
it's also building on those traditions.
- [Beth] Christ's body very much recalls
Michelangelo's figure of Christ in the Pieta,
but instead of that pyramid composition
that has that sense of stability,
here the composition takes the form of a circle,
which means that our eye never really comes to rest
and in the center,
we see a gesture of a figure holding up a cloth
and some hands holding up one of the hands of Christ.
These gestures that are hard to interpret
that occupy the very center of the composition.
- [Steven] Those gestures, though,
create an extraordinary sense of elegance,
an elegance that we also see in that earlier Botticelli.
- [Beth] And we have
an entirely different historical context.
We have the beginnings of the Reformation
in Northern Europe, but also a new context here in Florence,
the dismantling of the Republic
and the consolidation of Medici rule
which will lead to the Medicis becoming
the Dukes of Florence.
- [Steven] So what is happening here,
what is the subject of this painting?
Art historians are all over the map.
- [Beth] And that's because sometimes we think about
this as a Lamentation,
that is Christ's followers grieving over his dead body.
Sometimes it's been interpreted
as a Deposition from the cross,
except we don't have a cross and we don't have a ladder.
We don't have many of the figures
we would normally associate with a Deposition.
And so what exactly is going on here?
- [Steven] It has been suggested
that this is Christ being lowered into the tomb.
- [Beth] The tomb which would be basically
in this very space of the chapel.
- [Steven] Other art historians have suggested
that Christ's body is being lifted
onto the lap of the Virgin Mary.
That is, this is the moment before the Pieta
and still other art historians suggest
that, perhaps unique in art history,
Christ is being lowered onto the table
of the alter that exists physically in this small chapel.
- [Beth] Luther had called into question,
the notion of transubstantiation,
the miracle that takes place at every mass
when bread and wine are transformed
into the body and blood of Christ.
And showing Christ's body being lowered onto the altar
is a confirmation of that miracle.
Another interpretation is that the figures
who look out at us are two angels
and they've removed Christ from Mary's lap
and are going to elevate his body toward heaven,
toward God the father who once appeared in the dome above
in a pose, perhaps,
that indicated his welcoming of Christ's body.
In that case, this subject would be close
to a well-known subject called the Throne of Mercy,
where God holds the crucified Christ.
- [Steven] And if that's correct,
we're being asked not to look at this altar painting
in isolation, but in a relationship
with the fresco that would have been above it.
- [Beth] And we've been talking
about how its iconography is different
than traditional depictions of the Lamentation
or the Deposition.
We've been talking about the historical context,
and we've been talking about the formal properties
of how this painting looks.
And we've been looking at the context of the chapel itself
to tell us about Pontormo
and this moment in Florentine painting in the 1520s.
(upbeat music)