b Pontormo, nr Empoli, 26 May 1494; d Florence, 31 Dec 1556). Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the leading painter in mid-16th-century Florence and one of the most original and extraordinary of Mannerist artists. His eccentric personality, solitary and slow working habits and capricious attitude towards his patrons are described by Vasari; his own diary, which covers the years 1554-6, further reveals a character with neurotic and secretive aspects. Pontormo enjoyed the protection of the Medici family throughout his career but, unlike Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari, did not become court painter. His subjective portrait style did not lend itself to the state portrait. He produced few mythological works and after 1540 devoted himself almost exclusively to religious subjects. His drawings, mainly figure studies in red and black chalk, are among the highest expressions of the great Florentine tradition of draughtsmanship; close to 400 survive, forming arguably the most important body of drawings by a Mannerist painter. His highly personal style was much influenced by Michelangelo  Related Paintings of Pontormo, Jacopo :. | Vertumnus and Pomona | Leda and the Swan | The Visitacion | St John the Evangelist | Madonna and Child with Two Saints |
Related Artists:
Felix Vallotton
1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.
NUVOLONE, Panfilo
Italian painter, Lombard school (1581-1651) After studying with Giovanni Battista Trotti, he moved to Milan, where he is recorded in 1610. The influence of Trotti and of late Cremonese Mannerism is evident in his first known work, SS Nicholas and Costanza Adoring a Miraculous Image of the Virgin (1607; Can?nica d'Adda, S Giovanni Evangelista). In his paintings of scenes from the Life of Samson (1610-14; Milan, S Angelo, Cappella Sansoni) Nuvolone moved away from Trotti, exaggerating the size of the figures and defining form with an academic clarity reminiscent of the contemporary art of Camillo Procaccini. There followed, shortly after the work in S Angelo, frescoes of the Coronation of the Virgin and other scenes in the presbytery of S Maria della Passione in Milan, and, in 1614, a lunette of the Angel Announcing to Mary her Approaching Death for S Domenico, Cremona (Cremona, Mus. Civ. Ala Ponzone). In 1620 he painted the Coronation of the Virgin for the Swiss parish church in Milan (in situ). Still tied stylistically to the earlier work in S Maria della Passione, this demonstrates the difficulty Nuvolone experienced in breaking with the late Mannerism of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Giuseppe Meda (d 1599) and Ambrogio Figino and in adapting to new trends in 17th-century Milanese painting. His Virgin and Child with Two Saints (1624; Milan, S Eustorgio), featuring stiff figures and inflated Mannerist drapery with its metallic folds, indicates continued contact with Procaccini. In the same year he was employed in the decoration of the Collegiata di Appiano Gentile, where he painted two scenes from the Life of St Stephen and a Virgin and Child with SS Anthony and Victor. He continued to produce a vast number of repetitive religious works, yet these are less interesting than his still-life paintings, generally of fruit stands with peaches and grapes presented symmetrically against dark backgrounds.
Fred Morgan
British 1856-1927