No one can fail to be enthralled by this charismatic work, including Jonah Jones. With an extensive career in art exhibitions and management, he is concerned above all with the public reception of Pontormo. He takes the reader with him on an inclusive and informative mission to ensure the recognition this highly original artist deserves. Writing today, however, Pontormo simply cannot be described as ‘neglected’. This estimation is a quotation from the author of the first monograph on Pontormo, Frederick Mortimer Clapp, writing in 1916. Jones’s book is in many ways a homage to Clapp, a fascinating scholar and inaugural director of the Frick Collection, who had the insight and means to bring Pontormo to wider attention. Since then there has been sustained publication on the artist from leading scholars in Renaissance art history, as demonstrated in Jones’s own fulsome bibliography.

Another strong but darker presence is from the past, Pontormo’s contemporary Giorgio Vasari, who, no doubt out of artistic rivalry, wrote stories portraying Pontormo as reclusive and neurotic. This characterisation has had pervasive influence, compounded by the remarkable diary Pontormo left behind. Vasari’s image of Pontormo’s elevated work space, accessed only by a ‘wooden ladder which he drew up after him, so that no one could come up without his knowledge or permission’ is unforgettable. Yet art historian Elizabeth Pilliod has shown that, rather than indicating obsessive privacy, the drawbridge ladder was a structural aspect of Pontormo’s house and that Vasari’s objection reveals his ‘frustration before the spectacle of a court artist who preferred to live like an artisan’. Jones also counters the negative impact of Vasari’s tales, especially with his chapter ‘Pontormo’s neighbourhood’, building a picture of his daily habits, those with whom he dined (often Bronzino), his property acquisitions, and his connections with the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Likewise, the chapter ‘Death, Burials and Population’ provides enlightening context, especially the moving account of Pontormo’s final burial as the first artist to be interred in the artists’ communal tomb, Santissima Annunziata, which demonstrated the high regard in which he was held by local Florentine artistic society.

Less effective is Jones’s suggestion of ‘Florentine expressionism’ to replace the admittedly unhelpful term ‘Mannerism’. While Pontormo radically transformed the visual effects of his predecessors, the idea of ‘expressionism’ has no sixteenth-century historical basis and instead diverts attention from the creative historical continuities between these generations and the strength of their apprentice workshop training. In particular Pontormo’s debt to his master Andrea del Sarto is evident in many of the most original-seeming aspects of his style, including his brilliant, dissonant colours and splintered facets of form. His joyous pastoral frescos for the Medicean Villa Poggio a Caiano (1519) pay homage to both Andrea and Michelangelo in their articulate draughtsmanship. A kind of secular, springtime fragment of the Sistine chapel, it is hard to imagine Pontormo’s bucolic youth with dangling legs reaching for branches without the anatomical precedent of Michelangelo’s gyrating Jonah from the ceiling frescos.

Pontormo, Deposition from the Cross, 1525–28 (Wikimedia Commons)Should books about artists be written only by scholars specialised in their subject? Can years pursuing private study stand alongside professional research from within the ranks of academia? As an introduction to the artist, this book has charm and, given the range of information it contains, is usefully compact and accessible, with small scale, accurate colour images. Jones has obviously consulted Florentine authorities and archives, but freely admits his scholarly limitations. This book makes the case for the generalist or the well-informed ‘amateur’ in the true sense of ‘lover’ of art. While the result combines a mix of sources, mostly secondary, they are brought together with a persuasive personal commitment, not least in his final dedicatory text to the artist, for setting the record straight.

An artist’s reputation, however, is vulnerable to fickle tastes as much as serious cultural shifts. Many artists have had their time in and out of the limelight, and many more, especially women, are yet to have their day at all. Even the great Raphael, darling of the Victorian era, is less popular now than he was. Closer to this book’s interests, we can turn to the recent major exhibition, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism (Palazzo Strozzi, 2014), to find that Rosso continues to be seen as a quirky foil for the more mainstream Pontormo, a judgement summed up by Martin Gayford: ‘One leaves feeling Rosso was a fascinating oddball, but Pontormo was a truly great painter.’ Yet Rosso produced works of incomparable power including his masterpiece Descent from the Cross (1521), which is still housed at Pinacoteca Communale, Volterra.

There are really only a handful of artists who command fame going beyond the recognition that Pontormo already enjoys. And would we wish that on any artist, to be so pursued by tourists for the sake of celebrity alone? Do we want all great art to be housed under guard in grand museum spaces tricked up for public attention, or do we want a moment of intimate encounter with Pontormo’s altarpiece in Santa Felicita, almost hidden in a hushed sacred space, when we become again pilgrims of art?