1: 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.
|
