Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Jacopo Carrucci (1494-1557), called Pontormo after his birthplace, was the main representative of Florentine Mannerism, the 75-year period that links the High Renaissance and early Baroque eras. This book presents an overview of the artist's most important achievements.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

School Library Journal Review

Nigro here assembles critical and literary references to the Mannerist artist who admired and was influenced by Michelangelo and was a pupil of Andrea del Sarto. The bulk of this book consists of beautiful color plates with dissonant commentaries. Although similar in style and format to Pontormo: Drawings (Abrams, 1992), it differs in offering a chronology based on Vasari's Lives instead of the artist's own diary and provides detailed bibliographic notes as well. Libraries that own Drawings should definitly purchase this compliment; both are suitable for Mannerist and other collections serving advanced studies in the period.-Ellen Bates, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This book is typical of a certain type of publication on the visual arts current in Italy. It should not have been translated from the Italian and republished. The very brief text (ten pages) is a rambling personal reflection by the author, a professor of Italian literature at Catania University. At best, one might say it is ahistorical, at worst that it tells more about the author's interests than about Pontormo's. The extended captions to the plates are, for the most part, quotations from other sources. A chronology at the end of the book also consists mostly of quotations. The color is generally good, with notable exceptions such as the lunette fresco of Poggio a Caiano and the Florence Deposition, but the plates do not warrant the cost of the book, especially since the author chose not to include drawings, a medium in which Pontormo is one of the greatest masters of the 16th--or any other--century. This book may look fetching on a coffee table, but it is not much use for a library shelf. J. T. Paoletti; Wesleyan University

Booklist Review

The author is a professor of Italian literature in Sicily, his subject the Italian painter Jacobo Carrucci (1494-1557), known as Pontormo. Pontormo's importance is as a bridge between the Renaissance and the baroque; and it's obvious, in examining the excellent, one-per-page reproductions, that in his use of color, in his sense of movement, and in his genius for exploiting light to enhance dimension, Pontormo looked toward the baroque period's consciousness of fluidity and away from the reserve and even staginess of Renaissance art. In his text--an introductory essay and full captions to the plates--Nigro emphasizes Pontormo's visionariness as opposed to realism; what he rendered on canvas and plaster was visions stamped with deeply personal interpretations of biblical events and even human nature. For active art collections used by readers well versed in art history. ~--Brad Hooper