The story
Three detached frescoes by Jacopo Pontormo, the Florentine Mannerist, are kept in the rooms of this academy. They once formed a roadside tabernacle at Boldrone, on the northern edge of Florence, near a monastery. The crucified Christ stands between the Virgin and Saint John in the middle panel, with Saint Julian in a red cloak on one side and Saint Augustine with his staff on the other. Pontormo painted them in the 1520s, when prints by the German artist Albrecht Dürer were circulating in Florence, and the figures show their influence.
The academy itself is one of the oldest in Europe. Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Florence, founded it in 1563 at the urging of the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, and Michelangelo was elected its first head, a year before his death. Members studied geometry and anatomy alongside drawing, and Galileo joined in 1613. Three years later Artemisia Gentileschi, the Roman-born painter, became the first woman admitted.
It still elects artists, architects and scholars, and it meets on Via Orsanmichele in the Palazzo dell'Arte dei Beccai, the old hall of the butchers' guild, across the street from the church of Orsanmichele.
