Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art

Three Italian Renaissance artists -- Jacopo da Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Alessandro Allori -- were closely related personally and professionally and dominated Florentine art for almost a century. In this highly original study, Elizabeth Pilliod offers a reassessment of their lives, work, and artistic lineage, challenging the view that has prevailed since Giorgio Vasari wrote dismissively about them in his sixteenth-century Lives.

Pilliod compares information from documents she has discovered to Vasari's versions of the artists' lives and shows how Vasari manipulated their biographies -- for example supressing any mention of Pontormo's status as a court artist, including his salary from Duke Cosimo I -- in order to diminish their reputations, to obliterate memory of the traditional Florentine workshops, and to enhance the importance of the academy instead. She also discusses such subjects as the evidence for Pontormo's association with the Medici court; Pontormo's house and its place in the urban fabric of Florence; Bronzino's and Pontormo's intimate association with poets and theatrical spectacles; and Allori's painted challenge to Vasari's view of the artistic scene in sixteenth-century Florence. The book is a major revision of our understanding of Florentine art and society of the sixteenth century, a new way of looking at Vasari's Lives, and consequently a significant reconsideration of the historiography of Renaissance art.