Product Description

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 Vasari's versions of the artists' lives and shows how Vasari manipulated their biographies—for example supressing any mention of Pontormo's 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 Pontormo's association with the Medici court; Pontormo's house and its place in the urban fabric of Florence; Bronzino's and Pontormo's intimate association with poets and theatrical spectacles; and Allori's painted challenge to Vasari's 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 Vasari's Lives, and consequently a significant reconsideration of the historiography of Renaissance art.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #255630 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 300 pages

From Library Journal
Pilliod (art, Oregon State Univ.) methodically argues for both a reassessment of the place of Jacopo da Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Alessandro Allori in 16th-century painting and for a new understanding of the role of Giorgio Vasari's Lives in art history. Using sociological and historical data, she compiles a portrait of 16th-century painting at odds with the view accepted through the centuries by historians who relied primarily on Vasari for their factual information. By following the money, she proves conclusively that Pontormo was a court painter under the rule of the Medici and was actually a competitor of Vasari for the favor of the duke. Bronzino was a student of Pontormo and Allori, in turn, a student of Bronzino. Though Vasari would tag them as minor participants, the author maintains that they dominated the art of the period. In the eyes of the court, artists were important only in their ability to illustrate what its literary propaganda dictated. But as Pilliod notes, these three artists not to mention Vasari are better known today than are those who did the dictating. This book deserves a wide audience among specialists for its original, well-stated, and erudite text. Ellen Bates, New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
This book deserves a wide audience among specialists for its original, well-stated, and erudite text. -- Library Journal

About the Author
Elizabeth Pilliod is associate professor of art at Oregon State University.

Customer Reviews

Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: Mission Accomplished
I learned a new word the other day, and through coincidence it seems to refer directly to Elizabeth Pilliod's "Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori." "Microstoria" is a term for historical information discovered through the analysis of documents that recount the daily activities of ordinary individuals. Though it's arguable that many of the individuals whose stories Pilliod weaves into "Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori" were anything but ordinary, microstoria is still her method, and her book demonstrates her mastery of it. The book is about the difference between the evaluation of the three eponymous painters in Giorgio Vasari's canonical "Lives of the Artists"-the 16th-century compendium that still shapes today's received ideas about the Italian Renaissance-and the actual facts about their lives, their interrelations, and their contemporary reputations, as painstakingly unearthed by Pilliod in the course of ten years of research. What she discovers-that Pontormo, Bronzino, and Allori held very different places in the art world and in the evaluations of their peers and patrons than the second-string status ascribed to them by Vasari and perpetuated by centuries of unquestioning acceptance of his work-should come as no surprise to anyone more familiar with the painters' works (scores of which are beautifully reproduced throughout the text) than with the traditional scholarship that has served to obscure them.

Pilliod's mission here is the rescue of these three great artists from an official history based on ancient, unreliable, and hostile opinion. In order to execute it successfully, she needed to be fluent in various versions of various languages from the 16th century to the present; adept at discovering, navigating, and mining myriad libraries, archives, collections, correspondences, museums, and middens; au courant with about 450 years of previous criticism; a skilled, sensitive psychohistorian; a fearless detective; and an x-ray-eyed connoisseur. Part of the treat of reading "Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori" is witnessing the author's command of all those skills and more, displayed in lucid and entertaining prose.

"Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori" may well mark a pivot point in our understanding not only of the artists it vindicates, but of the too-infrequently examined mechanisms of art history as well. Read it if you're an art lover; read it if you're an art historian; be sure to read it if you're a scholar of the period.