The Deposition

Jacopo da Pontormo in Florence (c.1526-1528) the so-called Deposition is a prime example of early Florentine Mannerism. It offers a treatment of Christ's removal from the Cross which is markedly different from the iconography of Passion. Christ is seen without the cross, without a tomb and without nails to define the moment – none of these indicators are visible – instead we see an image where the bodies seem to hover, turn and even seemingly support one another without anything evidently weighting them down. This work by Pontormo was painted for the banker Lodovico di Gino Capponi and took around three years to complete, replacing the conventional narration of Christ's death with a more dramatic, poignant and enigmatic moment of mourning. Historically, the difficulty of resisting a single definitive narrative identity for the painting has intrigued art historians. Leo Steinberg has argued convincingly that it is not a simple Deposition or Entombment: the figures seem to participate simultaneously in several moments of the Passion, creating a strangely suspended sense of time. Steinberg's comparison with the sketch for the main figure in Christ Church, Oxford (not depicted) is instructive here. In the earlier composition, a diagonal ladder that led from the Virgin's lap to Christ's was present in the preliminary sketch, in the finished version, the ladder disappears and is replaced by a nebulous, glowing cloud, seemingly filled with its own interior light. Christ's body is lifted into this angelic realm by two healthy young attendants whose unstable postures undermine any felt weight that they might have. Their toes seem barely anchored to the ground, and the entire composition revolves in a spiraling upward momentum that - Steinberg suggests - would have been complemented by a fresco of God the Father in the dome of the chapel. The altarpiece and dome would then be integrated into a complete theological schema in which Christ was visually coupled with the Gnadenstuhl. Jack Wasserman, who sees the painting as a Pietà in the process of revelation, or a Pietà in fieri. He pays special attention to the signs of its liturgical context and references to popular devotion in the chapel. In response to the interpretation that Christ is being carried to heaven, he emphasizes the grouping of figures around the Virgin in a tight oval which, by refusing to allow the Virgin to be abandoned in the periphery, balances the composition, so that her authority, Wasserman argues, reflects its function as co-redemptrix. A major motif in this reading is the woman who supports Christ's head and turns his face towards the viewer, to be seen, as it were, in the act of dying. Wasserman relates this gesture to the theology of the Volto Santo, in which Christ's visible face makes the unseen face of God visible. The grave cloth held up by the group of women in mourning has a liturgical connotation in that their waving motion is the visual correlative of the elevation of the consecrated host on the altar table below at the memorial Masses conferred on Capponi. The altarpiece must also be understood in relation to the rest of the decoration of the chapel. As Louis Alexander Waldman rightly emphasizes, the already existing stained-glass window of the chapel, made by Guillaume de Marcillat and finished by September 1526, where the story of the Deposition and the Entombment were shown. This also can explain the decision of Pontormo not to show the ladder or other familiar details of the story in his composition. If he would use the same episodes, with the same content, repeated in the same way, it would hardly have added anything to the decoration programme of the chapel. His image, and the stained-glass window functioned differently and as complementary versions of the same story. Waldman also studies the impact of daylight in the chapel with the help of the canon at the beginning of the afternoon. The light falling through the coloured glass of the window, excited by the daytime sunlight, would have changed the nature of the interior, the coloured daylight falling on the painted figures would have interacted with the colored light of the window. It would have made the difference between the real space of the chapel and the designed space of the altarpiece less clear. The painting had been designed in conjunction with the architecture and the fluctuating light of the chapel to which it belonged. However, the painting's strangeness has contributed to its reception as well. The failed experiments with bodies, the distortion of limbs, the distorted facial expressions and unconventional juxtaposition of colours in the altarpiece can be read as Mannerist excess. F. David Martin contends that such distortion stems from the material from which Pontormo drew when developing his style. Michelangelo's influence shows itself in the sculptural treatment of the bodies, but Pontormo reworks existing figural types within a space that violates the stability and the balancing harmony that marks the High Renaissance. Bodies crowd and permeate one another, gestures seem to overlap, and the pale pinks, greens and blues of the cangiante garments work together to create a deliberately disturbing colour palette. The altarpiece does not simply diverge from the classical canon; the tensions between forms intensify the emotional impact of the scene, creating a visual expression of both the physical agony and spiritual alteration of the dead Christ. The figures' ponderous movements obscure the difference between the heaviness of Christ and the fervour of devotion, and Pontormo preserves in the altarpiece the mystery at the heart of the Christian myth.