Saint Antoine le Grand

Pontormo was still a young Florentine around 1519 when he made this intense image of Saint Anthony Abbot, the hermit who had withdrawn into the Egyptian desert. Nobody knows who ordered it. What the picture does show is a painter drawing on two very different sources at once. The saint's tense, gnarled face owes something to the German prints of Albrecht Durer, which Pontormo studied and admired. The great twisting gesture of his arm recalls the prophets and sibyls that Michelangelo had recently painted on the Sistine ceiling in Rome, which Pontormo appears to have travelled south to see a few years earlier. He gives the old hermit a staff in one hand and an unrolled scroll in the other.