Portrait of Gentleman with Book and Gloves

The history of the attribution of this masterpiece by Il Pontormo begins in 1952 with an article by Roberto Longhi capturing its pictorial and inventive qualities in an illuminating metaphor: “The equally elongated figure of subtle charm occupies nearly all of the height available, like a lute in its case, and the head with all of its intelligence and pathos, is hatched from the case of abstract shadow into the light […] the back of the dangling right hand looks flayed, as though the glove it holds were its skin (was the subject’s name Bartholomew by any chance?) and the open book leaps out in the other hand, frozen in bright light as in a naturalistic work of a later period”.¹ These visual metaphors still hold today and little of greater precision can be added to outline the style of Il Pontormo, who captures the living quality of the entire figure also through the oval shape of the glowing sleeve that visually supports a face with a proud, direct and quizzical gaze, as though the subject had just looked up from his deliberately displayed reading.

The painting was exhibited for the first time in 2010² and its authenticity has never been challenged since. Before then, however, Janet Cox-Rearick, Kurt Foster and initially Costamagna himself³ doubted Il Pontormo’s authorship due to the fact that it was impossible for them to examine the work first hand. This authorship was instead asserted, albeit on the basis of a photograph alone, by Federico Zeri, Alessandro Conti and the present author.⁴ Those of this opinion compared the depiction of the body and the white sleeve, where the fabric sways like liquid material in the light, with the similar stylistic distortions to be found in the portraits of Maria Salviati (Florence, Uffizi) and Niccolò Ardinghelli or Monsignor della Casa (Washington, National Gallery), datable to the beginning of 1541.⁵ In any case, it was not until the exhibition in Milan and the one of 2011 in Florence⁶ that the critics unanimously recognised the extraordinarily high quality of the painting, one of the few portraits certainly belonging to Il Pontormo’s late period.

If anything remains to be ascertained, it is the date of the work, for which comparisons are to be drawn not only with the two above-mentioned portraits of Maria Salviati and Niccolò Ardinghelli but also with the style of the drawings made by Il Pontormo for the loggia of the Villa di Castello, which was painted for Cosimo I on his rise to power after the Battle of Montemurlo in 1537. In those frescoes, according to Giorgio Vasari, “the figures appear very much out of proportion and there are some distortions and attitudes that look very odd and devoid of measure”.⁷ In the drawings datable to the period from the late 1530s all the way to the last ones for the choir of San Lorenzo in the early 1550s, the bodies are increasingly deformed, expanding and appearing to float weightlessly, like the elongated torso and the sleeve of soft, translucent fabric in this portrait. All of this stylistic evidence suggests that the work can be dated to the early 1540s and demonstrates the gap between Il Pontormo’s subjective choices and the demands made by Cosimo on the arts at the time of the transformation of the Accademia degli Umidi into the Accademia Fiorentina.

While Bronzino was to provide the splendour required by the Medici court also in portraiture, Il Pontormo instead preferred an almost monochrome simplicity of the image, animated only in this case by the unusual depiction of the act of reading and the vividness of the expression. There is no external element to identify the subject, for whom Costamagna tentatively suggests the name of Cosimo Bartoli, a literary figure close to Cosimo I and one of the founders of the Accademia degli Umidi, in whose home the statute of the new Accademia Fiorentina was drawn up in March 1541.⁸ As in other portraits of academicians, like the one of Carlo Rimbotti painted by Francesco Salviati a few years later,⁹ Il Pontormo places a slender volume, possibly a small 16th-century edition of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, in the centre as the fulcrum of the work. The presence of the book in one hand and the gloves in the other as well as the preference for dark clothing of simple elegance have been traced back to the advice on dress and conduct in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.¹⁰ Attention should finally be drawn to the natural, lifelike quality of the subject’s expression and the book illuminated “in bright light as in a naturalistic work of a later period”¹¹ in contrast with the dark background. This ability to capture the change in phenomena was asserted by Il Pontormo also in a letter to Benedetto Varchi in connection with the dispute on the relative merits of the different arts initiated by the latter in 1547.¹²

[Carlo Falciani]

¹ Longhi 1952, p. 40.

² Milan 2010.

³ Costamagna 1994, pp. 90, 294-295, no. A54, with previous bibliography.

⁴ Zeri 1986, pp. 48-49; Conti 1995, pp. 40-41; C. Falciani, “Maria Salviati ritratta dal Pontormo”, in Natali 1995, p. 131.

⁵ C. Falciani, in Florence 2011, pp. 118-119, cat. II.3.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Vasari 1966-97, vol. V, 1984, p. 330.

⁸ Milan 2010, pp. 17-18.

⁹ Falciani 2018.

¹⁰ A. Geremicca, in Florence 2014, pp. 126-127.

¹¹ Longhi 1952, p. 40.

¹² See C. Falciani, “Il Pontormo alla Certosa fra Leonardo e la ‘maniera stietta tedesca’”, in Florence 2014, pp. 191-203.