Early in this far-reaching study, Massimo Firpo quotes historian Martin Wackernagel, who stressed that “the decisive elements for understanding a work of art are to be found ‘outside the artist's studio’” (11). Firpo's book, though ostensibly about the lost fresco cycle by Florentine artist Jacopo Pontormo in the Medici Church of San Lorenzo, presents a broad interdisciplinary study of Florence and Rome in the 1540s and 1550s, in order to interpret the iconography of the frescoes “as they were seen and conceived in the past” (7).
Pontormo died suddenly in 1556 after laboring on the frescoes for more than a decade, leaving them incomplete. They portrayed scenes from the Old Testament, employing throughout the motif of the nude body in states of sin, dissolution, salvation, and resurrection. The frescoes were immediately controversial, with Vasari offering a scathing and highly influential assessment in his Lives, claiming they were incomprehensible. Over the centuries their declining reputation, which paralleled their deteriorating condition (they were destroyed in 1742), contributed substantially to the near collapse of Pontormo's reputation in art history.
Firpo claims that the iconography illustrates the heterodox writings of Spanish theologian Juan de Valdés, a Catholic who drew inspiration from the Protestant Reformation, embracing a belief in justification by faith and clerical reform, while opposing the Lutheran schism. Valdés, censured by the Spanish Inquisition for criticizing corruptions in Rome, fled to Italy in 1531, where his writings were influential and controversial for the next two decades. His catechism was added to the first Index of Forbidden Books, published in Venice in 1549.
The frescoes were commissioned during the decades in which Rome was formulating its response to Luther's rupture and in which powerful groups of reform-minded people discussed and studied writers such as Valdés in hopes of reconciling with the Northern Reformers. As Firpo stresses, it was a fateful moment. The English cardinal Reginald Pole, an irenic Reformer, came within two votes of capturing the papacy in the conclave of 1549–50, but with the installation of Julius III, who reconvened the Council of Trent in 1551, many Reformers embraced Nicodemism to avoid censure. In 1555, the election of the anti-humanist, orthodox Paul IV (a Carafa hostile to Cosimo) ended all hopes of reform just as the San Lorenzo frescoes neared completion.
In the first half of the book, the author examines the frescoes and drawings, offering a detailed historiography and mapping out a novel sequence for their layout in the choir. He aligns images with Valdesian texts, showing a concordance between text and image. He assigns the iconographic program to humanist Benedetto Varchi, providing biographical and textual support for his choice. Firpo's argument hinges on assessing Duke Cosimo's motivations, as he certainly approved the project, and the second half of Firpo's book delves into the ducal court, the Florentine Academy, and the commissions and career of Duke Cosimo, with chapters given to Cosimo, Varchi, and the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli. Firpo interprets Vasari's criticism of Pontormo's frescoes as a smokescreen to protect Duke Cosimo from a charge of heresy, believing Cosimo had embraced the Valdesian iconography as a sign of his approval of the anticlerical doctrine of sola fide.
There remains the question of whether the pragmatic Cosimo would have courted the dangers ensuing from this lasting and heterodox provocation directed at Rome and displayed on the walls of the sacred temple of the Medici dynasty, while his grasp on power in Tuscany was not yet fully secured. The overwhelming spirituality of the frescoes, in style as well as meaning, may better support the more traditional goal of projecting princely piety through church patronage—this is a sober and esoteric rendition of man's history on earth, from creation through the end of time. However, Firpo argues persuasively, displaying his impressive strengths as a scholar of Reformation and Counter-Reformation Italy. Much of this study reprises a selection of Firpo's earlier publications in Italian. English-speaking scholars will welcome this fascinating glimpse into his extensive, career-spanning research on these subjects.
Firpo's book was first published by Einaudi in 1997, under the title Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo, eresia, politica e cultura in Italian nella Firenze di Cosimo I. The current volume, published by Viella in Rome, has been admirably translated into English by Richard Bates.
