Pontormo at San Lorenzo. The Making and Meaning of a Lost Renaissance Masterpiece

This book completely revises and corrects the standard interpretations and understanding of Jacopo da Pontomo's lost masterpiece, the frescoes in the choir of the church of San Lorenzo at Florence, Italy.

Pontormo's frescoes in San Lorenzo were the most important cycle of the sixteenth century after Michelangelo's Sistine frescoes. They had an enormous impact on artists until their destruction in the eighteenth century, and their interpretation has also had a significant bearing not only on the reception of this artist, but also of late Renaissance art in Florence.
Based on careful archival and historical scholarship, this book determines a new date for the inception of the fresco cycle and reconstructs the day by day procedures through which the artist generated his creation. It establishes his working method, and what it produced. It creates a new visual order for the frescoes. It sets them into the artistic and architectural context of the church in which they were created, relating them to a complex liturgical and religious function. It establishes the intentions of the both the Medici and the canons of the church in having Pontormo paint the specific space in the church where he painted, and the specific subjects that were included. Finally, it reveals the hitherto unsuspected impact Pontormo's paintings had on other works of art.
Elizabeth Pilliod is the author of Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art; Italian Drawings: Florence, Siena, Modena, Bologna; Drawings in Swedish Public Collections 8; numerous articles on 16th century Florentine art; and co-editor of Time and Place. Essays in the Geohistory of Art. She has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence and a NEH stipend recipient.