TIME has treated no other great painter so harshly Jacapo Pontormo. From the whole last quarter-century of his career only two works in painting remain to us, both in portraiture, which was for him a secondary genre. His loggia frescoes at the Medecian villas of Careggi (1535-36) and Castello (1538-43), as well as the great fresco cycle in the choir of S. Lorenzo (1546-56), have vanished altogether, leaving only Pontormo's ideas remarkable in quality, but no evidence for his powers as a painter; the two tapestries made c.1545-46 from his design for the series meant to hang in the Sala dei Dugento of the Palazzo Vecchio obviously contain no trace of his hand. The reappearance of a painting from this period is thus of some significance, even if what has reappeared is only a fragment of a larger work.
THE commission for Bronzino's portrait of Cosimo I in armour is mentioned by Vasari immediately following his description of the frescoes in the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo in the Palazzo Vecchio, works datable to 1540-43:
Il signor duca, veduta in queste ed altre opere l'eccllenza di questo pittore, e particolarmente che era suo propio ritarre dal naturale quanto con più diligenzia si può imaginare, fece ritrarre s, che allora era giovane, armato tutto d'arme bianche e con una mano sopra l'elmo.
There has been considerable confusion (and little consensus) among critics and historians concerning the identity of the picture referred to, its size, the number of replicas made of it, and the authorship of those paintings.
ACCORDING to Vasari, Lorenzo di Credi was 'molto parziale della setta di fra' Girolamo da Ferrara'. This much repeated claim was treated with considerable reserve in 1966 by Gigetta Dalli Regoli, who detected little specifically 'Savonarolan' influence on the artist's work, and it has been dismissed vigorously as undocumented by Ronald Steinberg in a recent book on Savonarola and Florentine art.
SOME years ago, Graham Pollard drew attention to a statement of 1480, in which one Michelangelo Tanaglia declared himself the owner of a house in Florence near the Duomo. The house bordered on others, one of them belonging to 'Andrea di Brioschi detto Riccio'. This Riccio's employment is not stated. Pollard supposed, and it was a perfectly natural inference, that he was none other than the great Paduan sculptor, Andrea Briosco, best known by his nickname of Riccio. If Pollard were correct, a period of training in Florence for the Paduan Might easily be hypothesised on the basis of the document.
THE main purpose of this note is to identify the four attendant figures in Parmigiano's Madonna of St Margaret in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna (Fig. 21); but the preliminary drawings for the picture of the work's sources in the art of drawings for the picture and the work's sources in the art of Correggio will also be discussed.