Comune di Empoli Provincia di Firenze Regione Toscana
Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici
e Storici di Firenze presents THE DIARY of Jacopo da Pontormo
The exhibition
The city of Empoli has organized an exhibition in the Convent
of the Agostiniani to render homage to one of the most famous of its sons, Jacopo
Carrucci, painter and brilliant protagonist of the early Mannerist school; born
on May 24th 1494 in the suburb of Empoli of Pontorme,
he made his name in history as Jacopo
Pontormo. Two years after the celebrations for the fifth centenary of the
birth of the artist, the City Council of Empoli is concluding the Pontormo events
with another initiative in his honour that also coincides with the two great
exhibitions at the Uffizi dedicated to the "Mannerist workshop" and "Drawings
by Pontormo", once more transforming the usual centenary rituals into a productive
cultural event that is likely to have a long-lasting effect.
Pontormo,
Study for naked figure
The city has in actual fact organized a double homage to the
artist. First of all by publishing a fac-simile of the Diary
that the artist kept in the last few years of his life (1554-1556), while he was
working on the frescoes in San Lorenzo,
and secondly by organizing an exhibition dedicated to the original manuscript
and the most recent studies regarding it. The Diary is composed of a nucleus of
23 sheets of paper on which Pontormo
noted down his ideas and the events in his daily life: his meetings with his friends,
his illnesses, his worries, his diet and his work in San
Lorenzo, including the technical problems involved for carrying it out. This
is why the pages of the manuscript also contain various pen and ink figure drawings
(again by the hand of the artist), sketched as memoranda in the margins and relative
to the great composition that he was working on.
The fresco in San Lorenzo was left unfinished on the
death of the artist and subsequently destroyed in around 1740. Therefore the series
of sketches contained in the Diary are extremely important
because they contain a great deal of information on this lost work. The fac-simile
edition of the Diary,preserved in the National Central
Library in Florence, was carried out in collaboration with the Salerno Editrice
in Rome; prepared by Roberto Fedi, it contains a codilogical study by Stefano
Zamponi and a description of the drawings by Elena Testaferrata.
The second event organized by the City Council of Empoli in honour of the artist
is an exhibition aimed to give people the chance to find out more about his work
and its importance: it will be open from December 21st 1996 to February 23rd 1997
(hours 10am-6pm; closed on Mondays; tel. 0571-707880), in the Convent of the Agostiniani,
a monumental building situated in the old city centre, and in the near vicinity
of the Church of Santo Stefano, the Collegiate of Sant'Andrea and the Museum,
all of which contain rich collections of priceless works of art.
The exhibition is divided into two sections. The first section, reserved for the
original drawings, displays (for the first time to the public), the unbound edition
of the diary carried out by Pontormo,
together with the voluminous composite codex in which the Diary
was included a few centuries ago. With it we can also admire another manuscript
that is also preserved in the Florentine library, in other words, the transcription
of Pontormo's diary that Filippo Baldinucci carried out directly from the original
document in the mid 17th century (this attribution has only recently definitely
established). The section ends with three of Pontormo's original preparatory drawings
for the frescoes in San Lorenzo in Florence which come
from the Uffizi Gallery of Prints and Drawings..
The second section of the exhibition displays the scientific discoveries made
during the philological research on the manuscript with a series of panels containing
photographic reproductions of each of the 23 written papers of the Diary,
the transcription of the text and an annotated glossary (with captions and illustrations)
to help recompose and clarify the various subjects covered in the pages of this
extraordinary example of memoirs from the sixteenth century. A unique document
about the way the artist lived and worked that, without rhetoric, describes his
daily existence.