The greatest painting ever made!

 

The greatest painting ever made is...

Oh my god, this is so exciting!

I'm on the edge of my seat!

The greatest painting ever made is...

The Deposition from the Cross by Jacopo Pontormo!

Wait, why isn't everybody more amazed and excited? 

Oh, right, because this is the third part of our analysis of this painting.

 

You want to see the painting? 

Okay, here is a barely adequate reproduction to get us warmed up:

Now, even though we are on the third and final part of our review of this greatest painting, parts one and two have merely set the stage and provided the context for our discussion today. So finally there's going to be tons of stuff today actually about the Deposition!

But first let's review as briefly as possible so we're all set to discuss this masterpiece like we're all big time Art History Majors.

1. Deposition from the Cross is the greatest painting ever, better than any other, with the understanding that there are many other greatest ever paintings, also better than any others. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it.

2. There were three sequential periods in art broadly around the time of this painting; Renaissance, then Mannerism, then Baroque. They are like an Oreo cookie. Renaissance is the first cookie and was about harmony, balance, developing naturalism, and the birth of individual celebrity genius. Baroque is the second cookie naturally progressing from the first, being about applying that mastery of naturalism to our own recognizable world and all its passionate, gritty reality. In between the two lay the strange and mercurial cream of the Oreo, Mannerism, the period which our painting by Pontormo occupies the very epicenter of.

3. Mannerism was the wild and crazy artistic answer to "What do you do when you've mastered naturalism and perfect anatomy and 3D rendering through linear perspective?" With the answer being: 

You mess with it. 

4. Michelangelo, genius of the Renaissance, kicked off Mannerism by getting so good at Renaissance art that he was bored of it (see hand, below, for example of perfected Renaissance naturalism).

So Michelangelo invented (sort of) Mannerism, taking complete command of the naturalism of Renaissance art and twisting it to the artist's vision, understanding, and expressions of heightened elegance. This, as seen below, in an example of his Sistine Ceiling, which is the first, great, and wildly influential, Mannerist work.

Now we're up to date!

Here is Jacopo Pontormo:

Hey, wait, we recognize this guy.

Where do we know him from?

Oh yeah, there he is. The figure on the far right in our painting, kind of in the back there.

Hi Jacopo! (One day maybe I'll tell you about his food journals!)

The best place I have ever been for looking at art, just wandering in someplace and looking at art, is Rome. It's not that there aren't dozens of places to pay to go see amazing art, or even legendary museums with blood curdlingly long lines and oppressive crowd control (hello Vatican Museum!), but you can also just wander into any number of mostly churches and see Raphael frescoes ignored in the corner, or a Michelangelo sculpture with a few velvet ropes protecting it, or countless Caravaggio paintings in dark side chapels that you will find pictures of in every reputable book on the history of art, and that are now just... sitting there, for you, in the dark.

But The Deposition (as we will henceforth call it) is in Florence. 

And Florence, while featuring nearly as great and vast a collection of art as Rome, does not have much one can just wander into, free and half ignored, and can have to yourself. Even though there is plenty of legendary Florence art socked away in churches and cloisters and side aspses and whatnot, they've done a fairly serious job of monetizing the lot of them, and making a little mini museum out of everything. 

But there is one exception.

The Deposition. 

By Pontormo. 

Yep this one, here it is, in situ:

Now, amazingly, this little chapel, the Capponi Chapel, was designed by one of the most important architects ever, Brunelleschi, the same guy who designed the Florence Cathedral Dome, one of the greatest feats in the entire history of Architecture! 

But we don't have time to go into all that. 

We'll just say Pontormo was asked (hired?) to decorate it.

This Capponi Chapel is in Santa Felicita, a modest church in (sort of) the heart of Florence. I say "sort of" because Santa Felicita really is pretty central, right near the Ponte Vecchio (the famous bridge) and just down the street from the Pitti Palace. 

But it is on the "wrong" side of the river, in the neighborhood called Oltrarno. So, "sort of".

Anyway, nice place, convenient location, free admission. I mean, one can just walk right into this church, Santa Felicita, and see the greatest painting ever made. That's how my wife and I saw it. It was crowded outside, but we were all alone with the painting. It's a pretty amazing thing. 

But you might be able to pick out a problem.

Yes, it's behind a cage. 

So that's kind of too bad.

Pontormo's Deposition is a picture of when Jesus's friends and family take him down from the cross after he's dead. That's why everyone looks pretty gobsmacked in the painting. Like:

I think that's Mary. And then there's this guy:

God I love their strange, almost elfen rounded faces, but I mustn't get sidetracked. Because my point is that even with all the weird, wild, Mannerist craziness in this painting, it is fair to start with this:

1. It is full of feeling. 

The Messiah guy, who was supposedly super nice and generous and wise, was institutionally murdered in an unbelievably brutal way, God on Earth was killed, and these people are brokenhearted! They are wandering, almost lost with grief, with his body, and with nowhere to go. It's terrible.

Remember how I said Mannerism came after The Renaissance and it was like they already mastered anatomy and naturalism and space and rendering in the Renaissance, so the Mannerists were like: 

Let's mess with it?

That doesn't mean they hadn't mastered all those things too. Remember Michelangelo's hand of David above as my example of perfecting representation? This painting is full of warped laws of physics, strange elongations, crazy colors, and twisting poses, but, check out, for example, this hand by Pontormo:

When Pontormo paints a pink lobster 9-foot crouching carrier of Christ it's not because he doesn't know how to do the perfect normal version at full on Rembrandt level. 

What I'm saying is: This painting is full astonishing rendering. 

It's just got some bigger fish to fry too.

Oh, and by the way. Do you know how many hands I counted in this painting? Eleven.

That's also the number of people in this painting.

It probably means something.

So what all is in this painting:

11 people with 11 hands visible

Some featureless ground that sort of disappears

A tiny cloud in the upper left

Enough pretty, colorful fabric that one could probably wrap up the moon in it.

That's all. 

No hill.

No strangers.

No cross.

Fun fact:

Brunelleschi, who designed this chapel, is generally credited as being the person who described and articulated the rules for linear perspective. This may have done more to change western painting than anything else ever. It ruled painting for 500 years and created the naturalism of space in painting according to scientific and mathematic principals.

But get this: Pontormo, painting said chapel many years later, fully versed in linear perspective, is nevertheless having none of that. Figures are floating in air, rising up (maybe that's why he put in a cloud, though it's a sad little gray one). There is no ground. No horizon. Not really even sky. And no linear perspective!

 Here, look at this guy again:

He's carrying the larger part of a dead Christ, crouched awkwardly, and it's like he's floating on his toes. Feet rise away from him on cloth, off the ground, into nothing.

He curves, he floats, he grieves. He's resplendent in gold and pewter and pink and sadness.

But look at it: everyone is floating, rising, lamenting, twirling, grieving, swirling. It's like a dance with everything curving and curling into everything else. The curve of the pink back. The curve of Christ's torso and thighs. The curve of Mary's head through her reaching arm, the curve of the leaning figure above her, and on and on.

Christ has died and they are lost, in space and time and purpose and grief.

It's pretty neat.

They are burdened with a dead god and it's beautiful and terrible.

It's a good painting.

Hundred greatest artworks: Deposition from the Cross by Pontormo, Part 2

 

In part one yesterday, we explained with a reductive, marginally accurate simplicity, that the Renaissance was an elegant, spiritual, and intellectual harmony played out in the perfecting of the illusion of "the real" in art. This led inevitably to the Baroque Period, which applied this naturalism to the recognizable, authentic world we live in, with all its gritty passions smeared out in front of us. And, ridiculously perhaps, I compared these two art periods to an Oreo Cookie. These, sequentially, were the two chocolate cookies one after the other, divided in time by the cream; which, in this case, is Mannerism.

And then I left you to muse upon this emblematic Mannerist painting, Madonna with the Long Neck by Parmigianino.

What the hell is this?

What happened?

And most of all, what is Mannerism?

Finally we will answer this question.

So picture this. The artistic culture of your highly religious world has spent hundreds and hundreds of years perfecting painting and sculpture. They've even gotten science and math involved to figure out how to make things look three dimensional and like they recede into space (by the power of perspective!). They've dug up old statues to figure out how to sculpt better (like they used to be able to do 1,500 years ago). They've even been sneaking into the graveyards to dig up bodies and cut them up to learn anatomy so they can render humans more perfectly. It's crazy. 

But finally they do it! By the time they've gotten to Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael, and Michelangelo, the best of the local artists are crafting luminous, accurate, inspired visions of reality. Pictures no longer feel like holy iconic symbols or representations, rather they often they feel like windows into other worlds. 

It's amazing. Indeed it's magic. Finally, finally they have captured reality itself!

 

Now what?

 

What do you do when you've perfected representation?

 

And the answer is Mannerism. You do Mannerism.

 

Again, what do you do when you've perfected representation?

 

The answer is:

You mess with it.

 

Look at that Madonna up above again! She is nine feet tall! So I guess it makes sense that any baby she has is as bizarre and as long as any of the admiring (actually they mostly look like they just want to be in the picture) crowd is tall. A tiny man recedes a thousand yards in the distance in the lower right, with a giant column... because! A mysterious leg appears from out of nowhere in the bottom left. And the curves, oh the curves! The baby swoops along, foot to head, his arm continuing the serpentine line along his mothers arm, curving down her finger and other arm, or inclining up and up and into her swan's neck and head, all elegant display and sinuousness. 

Delicious, no? The regular rules need no longer apply. Laps don't need to hold babies. Sitting people don't need to be able to stand up. The artists have already mastered reality. They are now on to pursue something greater. They are free to seek a perfection of manner. The soul of form. They cast for essential geometries and incandescent lines. Far away and close up. Colors and darkness. Old and new all at once. Reality is theirs now!

I mostly blame Michelangelo for this. The Pieta is just so... bloody... good.

The Pieta being good:

Sometimes geniuses are just so geniusy that they get a little wild with it. Michelangelo was 25 when he made the Pieta. 

He was 26 for the David. 

Just a hand from the David:

What, are you gonna sing the same damn song for the rest of your life? Our Renaissance cookie is now perfect and done and round. Enough already! What about some cream?

God lobster himself:

Once you have carved the face of God you might as well move on and try and get fancy with it. You know, have a little geniusy fun.

Eh, it's all gravy, pink and purple gravy.

And so at 33 Michelangelo goes off and paints the Sistine Chapel. It is full of unreal, electric pastel colors, 

and writhing forms in strange but evocative poses. 

He has mastered reality, now he heightens it. Heightened colors, heightened harmonies, heightened musculatures, heightened gestures, heightened aesthetics! Michelangelo invents Mannerism in the Sistine Chapel.

It's all a little irresistible. Who wouldn't follow this explosive reinvention, even if it is a tad loony? 

Do you, great artist, seriously want to pump out yet another Madonna with the child and the baby John the Baptist, all blah blah blah- super accurate again, in beautiful, harmonious triangles with solid anatomy and halos?

No.

NO!

You do not!

That is Boomer art! Old, stodgy, been there, done that, Boomer art!

So mix up that pink paint. Now the orange and turquoise! Practice your swirling spiral lines. Find a twisting and exotic pose. We can improve on reality now that we have mastered it! It is our duty to God!

Teaser and first glimpse:

 

Tomorrow, tomorrow we finally come to the greatest painting of Mannerism, aye, the greatest painting of all time:

The Deposition from the Cross, by Pontormo.

 

See you then.

Hundred greatest artworks: Deposition from the Cross by Pontormo, Part one

 

Welcome.

This is the inaugural post (one painting told in three parts!) of the Hundred Greatest Artworks of All Time, with each artwork being individually the single greatest artwork ever created and better than all others before or after.

Yes, that makes no sense. But if you want the sketchy art history education I'm going to be providing in this series you're going to have to roll with it.

This "rolling" will be good practice because you're going to have to do a lot of rolling with things in this series. And on that theme of rolling let us start with the round and humble Oreo.

In Italy, in the 14, 15, and 1600's, there were, generally speaking, three sequential major art periods. For our purposes think cookie, cream, and cookie again.

First, the first cookie, was the Renaissance, which we'll roughly place in the 1400's (though it rather runs on a way into the 1500's). The Renaissance was notable for its balanced harmony, its elegance, and its developing naturalism in service of heightened spiritual, intellectual, and artistic ideals. It's also known for its nearly deified artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael.

Here, have a Renaissance painting. This by Raphael:

Second, the thin layer of cream in between the earlier "Renaissance" cookie and the later "Baroque" cookie, is the art style known as Mannerism. This style, roughly of the 1500's, is the setting for the greatest painting ever made, today's "Deposition from the Cross" by Pontormo. So we'll come back to this 'Mannerism' in a moment.

Finally, the third period, following Mannerism, and so the completing cookie of our sandwich, is the Baroque Period of the 1600's. This style is notable for it's complete command of naturalism, it's drama, and its exploration of greater themes through gritty and authentic visions of the "real" world.

Here is a bit of a Baroque painting by Caravaggio:

So there is your Oreo: An exquisite spiritual elegance and expression on one side. The weight and the rough emotion of reality on the other, holding our mysterious thin layer of cream so perfectly expressed in our greatest painting today, the Mannerist "Deposition".

What is this cream? When can we see this greatest of paintings?

We'll get to it. First:

What are these cookies?

Think of the two cookies as complimentary. Both are substantial, emphatic, defined, and respected periods in the history of art. The two of them, Renaissance and Baroque, belong perfectly together in the evolution of artistic progression. After all, painting developed the ability to portray things so that they looked astonishingly like real life, and as they created an ability to convey in two dimensions the appearance of the third (this all in the Renaissance), wasn't the most inevitable and natural thing that painters would begin to paint the World as we recognizably know it and feel it to be (The Baroque)?

And yet, strangely, between the two, like the cream of our Oreo, something infinitely strange inserted itself, a step forward we could not have imagined;  Mannerism.

So what is Mannerism, and what happened?

We will finally dive into the answer to that tomorrow. But in preparation I leave you this emblematic piece of Mannerism, "The Madonna with the Long Neck", by Parmigianino. This strange cream between the two cookies is where we will pick up the story tomorrow.