The Eye by Philippe Costamagna

Author:Philippe Costamagna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939931702
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

When early one morning, some years ago, I went into the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, I did not know that I was taking the first step in a task that has since then occupied all my leisure. It was in the autumn, and I imagined—it seems to come back to me—that on such a sunny day it might be possible to see an altarpiece at which I had often peered in vain in the darkness of the Capponi Chapel. I was not mistaken. The light, slanting through the upper windows of the nave, was falling even into that dimmest of corners and, in the fugitive splendor, for the first time I really saw Pontormo’s “Deposition.”

The moment was one of unexpected revelation. As I studied the picture with amazement and delight, I became conscious not only of its beauty but of the blindness with which I had accepted the prejudice of those for whom Andrea del Sarto is the last great Florentine artist and his younger contemporaries, one and all, mere facile eclectics whose work Vasari summed up in the frescoes of the Palazzo Vecchio.

I had discovered Pontormo. Little by little I made my way through the neglect into which he had fallen, and he became for me a living person. His solitary aloofness appealed to me, his disdain of patronage, and the passion with which he pursued the phantom of a more creative, a more personal form of expression than the graphic arts are perhaps capable of affording.2

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