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Casa Natale di Pontormo (Birthplace of Pontormo)
Jacopo Carucci known as Pontormo was born in Pontorme, a small village on the Florence road near Empoli, in 1494.
The house where the artist was born has recently been restored and turned into a museum with a small but evocative number of items.
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On the ground floor there is a facsimile edition of Pontormo’s Diary, which offers interesting insights into the artist’s humanity, while his artistic creativity is reflected in facsimiles of his preparatory drawings for the altarpiece he painted for the Church of San Michele. These display the distinctive stylistic features that made Pontormo one of the finest exponents of the ‘modern manner’. It is also possible to detect his fondness for Hellenistic antiquities, his propensity for absorbing foreign languages and his interest in German figurative culture, above all Dürer.
A number of ceramic items give an idea of the everyday life of the inhabitants of Pontorme. On the first floor there is a beautiful ancient copy of Pontormo’s Madonna del libro (‘Madonna of the Book’), the original of which has been lost.
The other furnishings suit the house’s current use as a study centre focusing on 16th-century art in the Tuscan provinces and as the local council’s Cultural Heritage Education Department, which organizes workshops, lectures, theatre performances and seminars.
The Church of San Michele, situated in the centre of Pontorme, houses the altarpiece depicting Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Michael Archangel, executed by Pontormo in 1519. The figures are ‘contrapposto’, with the exception of the mirror-like arrangement of the cloaks, soft, red and enveloping in the case of the Evangelist and ragged and crackly in that of the Archangel. The elderly figure of John is twisted in on himself, and has an intense, absorbed gaze. By contrast, Michael the Archangel is depicted as a young man of Apollonian beauty, with a sinuous bearing and clad in elegant metal armour. Squatting at his feet is the devil, depicted as a child with diabolic ears, pointed wings and a pained expression.
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