Two Depositions

So, I may just be depressed because my boyfriend has been in Alaska for the past two months, or because summer in Seattle has been so short-lived, but for some reason these two paintings of Christ’s deposition from the cross (a definite downer of a subject) seemed like good things to write about this week.

Painted by two popular Italian Mannerist painters from the Florentine school, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, these depositions are interesting to me not because they’re depositions (mannerist painters loved the nascent emotion in the scene), but because of their composition.

Mannerism, the time after perfect realism was achieved by the likes of DaVinci and Michelangelo, is definitely well known as a period of distortion. Faces distorted by emotion, or body parts shortened or lengthened (Parmagianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck, 1540, below, is a famous example of Mannerism where distortion occurs in the name of beauty) – mannerists took what the High Renaissance painters and sculptures had learned about the human form and pushed it a step further. What I enjoy about mannerism is that artistic license had become an accepted concept – a commissioner knew that a mannerist painter would probably give him something he didn’t expect; artists had moved from craftsman to intellectuals.

Back to these two depositions, then. Both are painted on large panels with rounded tops, the center of altars. Both are colorful (Pontormo’s in bright pastels, Rosso Fiorentino using more dense and vivid tones), and both communicate the emotion of the scene through the body language and facial expression of the figures. But works are absolutely different.

The composition of the Pontormo Deposition from 1526-1528, the second work above, is downright strange. First, it doesn’t include a cross, wholly unnatural for a painting of the deposition. Figures are stacked on top of, in front of, and behind figures, and he plays with fabric throughout so that you feel a crowded, upended motion in the work. Background, once so important in the works of DaVinci, has been completely removed. There is no suggestion of a hillock that the grieving Mary could be standing on; rather, she hovers in space with other women on top of her. As you look at the frightened, distraught, and saddened faces in the work, the pale pastel colors and angelic golden curls do little to soften the feeling of upendedness that Pontormo creates.

Rosso Fiorentino’s Deposition from 1521 is quite different, in my mind. While he also stacks his composition, he acknowledges space within it. He maintains the tradition of the cross with weighty, solid beams and includes ladders for his figures to float on. The painting is anchored by the two bright, hefty cloaks at each of the bottom corners of the work. He too upends the viewer with diagonal lines of the distraught kneeling woman in red across the lower half of the work, and the skinny legs and arms of the man wrapped in yellow on a ladder above her. He’s deftly layered these figures, with a bottom tier standing on solid ground, a middle tier on the ladders, and an upper tier in the man above the cross. The eye circles round the work, but the strong vertical lines keep the journey orderly. Rosso’s Christ may be just as unsettling as Pontormo’s lack of setting, though – the peaceful, ashen face seems to smile.

Both works are great examples of Florentine mannerism, and really worth seeing in person if in Tuscany. The Fiorentino piece has recently been restored, and I still remember the vivid blues and reds from a day trip to Volterra, where it hangs, that I took two years ago. The Pontormo work is in Florence at the Chiesa Santa Felicita.