Jacopo De Pontormo: The Entombment Of Christ

Jacopo de Pontormo was a Florentine artist who was mostly funded by the wealthy Medici family. Decades before Pontormo received funding from the Medici patronage, Lorenzo—the most notable of the Medici family due to his control over Florence—died resulting in a cataclysmic Florence. After his death, the Medici family was exiled from Florence until they returned in 1512, when they started aiding Pontormo. One of Pontormo’s most recognizable artworks is The Entombment of Christ, which he painted from 1525-1528. This piece is especially notable because Pontormo takes an approach different to those before him. Traditionally in past centuries, Florentine artists painted images to be an identical copy of real world—an approach that is essential in the Renaissance Era between the late 1300’s to the late 1500’s. Renaissance artists used linear perspective and precise anatomical structures to perfect what humans see with their eyes. Pontormo still lived during the late period of the Renaissance, yet did not perfectly resemble their work; instead, his artwork, more specifically The Entombment of Christ, was coined as “the poster child of mannerism”. To accurately describe mannerism, one can refer to Pontormo’s altarpiece. Upon first

It is clear that there are people attempting to carry Christ’s pale body weighed down by sin, but due to the lack of background and any other contextual evidence, many cannot interpret whether this art depicts Christ’s entombment or his deposition. With no tomb illustrated and only the elongated figures, one cannot certainly reject that this does not depict Christ’s deposition. This deposition refers to Christ being taken down from the cross. However, using the same argument of lack of background contextualization, one cannot claim the painting portrays his deposition because of the absence of a