Porträt des Monsignore Della Casa

The man in black here wrote the book on manners, literally. Giovanni della Casa was the author of the Galateo, a guide to polite behaviour so influential that in Italian the word still means etiquette. Pontormo painted him in Florence in the early 1540s, when della Casa was a churchman in his early thirties collecting taxes for the papacy, long before the famous book. He stands in a dim interior, guarded and cool, one gloved hand holding the other, the whole mood held at arm's length. For a long time nobody knew who he was, and the sitter was called by another name entirely. The few architectural hints behind him point to Florence cathedral, where della Casa's church career was based.