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| In my good books |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
15 April 2006
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Pontormo, the great painter of Florentine Mannerism,
lived from 1494 to 1557, and in the last two years of his life
he kept a diary. This short document was found to be so curious
that it was preserved, and even copied in the 17th century.
Pontormo in his day was known as a melancholic, miserly, reclusive
character.
It was his habit, when he set to work on some
great project such as the chapel in the Santissima Annunziata
church, to have the site entirely barricaded off, and to refuse
to allow anyone at all to see what he was up to. At the end,
when the screens came down, there would be general astonishment,
admiration and some consternation, and sometimes plain incomprehension
and disappointment.
Speaking of his final work in the church of
San Lorenzo, Vasari is determined, "since I myself do not
understand it, although I am a painter, to leave all who may
see it to form their own judgment, for the reason that I believe
that I would drive myself mad with it and would bury myself
alive, even as it appears to me that Jacopo [Pontormo] in the
period of eleven years that he spent upon it sought to bury
himself and all who might see the painting, among those extraordinary
figures".
It was while he was painting this last fresco
cycle, which he never completed and which has since been destroyed,
that he kept his diary. For most of the time he saw nobody,
except occasionally the young men who were studying Michelangelo's
sculptures in the sacristy nearby, and would climb across the
roof, remove some tiles, and peer down at his work. This sent
the artist into a rage.
What obsessed him in his solitude was his diet,
and this is what the diary is all about: his diet, his deteriorating
health, his bowel movements, the weather. There were terrible
cold spells in the middle of good weather, and if you were caught
being careless about exercise, or your clothes, or sexual intercourse,
or overeating - in a few days you could be dead. That was in
autumn. In February you should live moderately in all ways,
"because pockets of mucus and phlegm open up in February,
March and April, because in the winter the cold congeals them".
One March, "when you could feel a venomous
cold fighting silently with the air warming in the season of
longer days, it was like hearing fire sizzle in water, so that
I was very frightened". He would eat a borage salad and
an omelette made of two eggs, and so many ounces of rosemary
bread. When he dined with his friend and fellow painter, his
former pupil Bronzino, he might indulge a little: blood pudding,
slices of liver and pork.
Work and food come in the same sentence: "On
the 20th Thursday I did the head that's screaming and at night
I had veal ... " "Saturday I did one thigh and they
celebrated the truce and at night I cooked a piece of goat."
Sometimes he hides at home: "15th Sunday Bronzino knocked
at my door and then during the day Daniello; I don't know what
they wanted." Vasari says Pontormo had a ladder to his
bedroom which he would draw up after him.
"In his last years," says Vasari,
"he kept in his house, as it were to bring him up, Batista
Naldini, who took such care of Jacopo's life as Jacopo would
allow him to take." The diary charts this sad affair of
the heart. "At night I was uneasy waiting for the meat
because Batista was [late], and it's the first time he hasn't
slept here, and when his father was sick he didn't stay with
him, and this time it's because he has a bed to sleep in at
Rotella's."
Then: "My Batista went out that night
and he knew I was sick and he didn't come back, something I
mean to remember always." "At night I ate a little
meat that did me little good since Batista had said that I would
have to manage for myself because he had been scolded for no
good reason."
They seem to have patched it up, for Batista
comes and goes, while Pontormo consoles himself with a plate
of innards. Then "Thursday I had mutton, that was the night
of the divisions." The next night, Friday 13, "Batista
locked himself in his room." Finally: "Friday night
I had fish for supper with Piero, and Batista left the note
which said he wasn't coming back, that was when he borrowed
the fish net."
"Borrowed the fish net"? It seems
to have been an idiom. Batista, a young and rather good artist,
can't take any more. Pontormo succumbs to dropsy and dies soon
after.
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