Pontormo

Step into a small chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Felicita and the altarpiece seems lit from another world. Pontormo's 'Deposition', painted between about 1525 and 1528, shows Christ being carried from the cross, yet there is no cross, no ground, almost no depth, just a swirl of figures in acid pinks, oranges and cold blues, holding a weightless body and looking out with open, worried faces.

This is Florentine Mannerism at its start, the generation after Michelangelo and Raphael pushing colour and pose past anything natural. Pontormo learned from those masters and then bent their rules until space itself feels unstable.

The man behind it was famously strange. His biographer Vasari, a fellow painter, describes him shutting himself away for weeks and hauling his bed up a ladder into a room no one could reach. In his last years Pontormo kept a diary of his aches, his meals and his moods while he worked alone on frescoes, now lost, in the church of San Lorenzo. He died at the end of 1556, with those frescoes still unfinished.