Pontormo, Bronzino, and Allori: A Geneaology of Florentine Art

Pontormo, Bronzino, and Allori: A Geneaology of Florentine Art by Pilliod, Elizabeth. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780300085433.

Three Italian Renaissance artists—Jacopo da Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Alessandro Allori—were closely related personally and professionally and dominated Florentine art for almost a century. In this highly original study, Elizabeth Pilliod offers a reassessment of their lives, work, and artistic lineage, challenging the view that has prevailed since Giorgio Vasari wrote dismissively about them in his sixteenth-century Lives. Pilliod compares information from documents she has discovered to Vasaris versions of the artists lives and shows how Vasari manipulated their biographies—for example supressing any mention of Pontormos status as a court artist, including his salary from Duke Cosimo I—in order to diminish their reputations, to obliterate memory of the traditional Florentine workshops, and to enhance the importance of the academy instead. She also discusses such subjects as the evidence for Pontormos association with the Medici court; Pontormos house and its place in the urban fabric of Florence; Bronzinos and Pontormos intimate association with poets and theatrical spectacles; and Alloris painted challenge to Vasaris view of the artistic scene in sixteenth-century Florence. The book is a major revision of our understanding of Florentine art and society of the sixteenth century, a new way of looking at Vasaris Lives, and consequently a significant reconsideration of the historiography of Renaissance art.