Disciple unmasks buried mannerist

One of the most idiliosyncratic painters associated with the Italian Renaissance, Jacopo Carrucci da Pontormo (1494-1557), was a contemporary and sometime collaborator with the great Florentine painter and sculptor Michelangelo.
Due in large part to the boost his reputation received from influential art historian Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo is one of the best-known figures of Western civilisation. Vasari, a friend to Michelangelo but apparent rival of Pontormo, seems to have chosen to damn the letter with faint praise in his monumental Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.
Consequently, the work of Pontormo fell into obscurity in the centuries following his death.
Indeed, a substantial amount of his art was destroyed completely as certain buildings whose interiors he was commissioned to beaautify with frescoes were demolished im Florence to make way for new construction.
Pontormo did not live to witness the causal obliteration of some of his most accomplished work, and luckily some preliminary sketches for lost frescoes have survived.
Jonah Jones, who operates an arts project management company based in Melbourne, has long been an admirer of Pontormo. In this book he seeks to shine a light on, as the subtitle puts it, “a great but neglected painter and draftsman of the first part of the 16th century”.