普奇祭坛画

Pontormo painted this altarpiece around 1518, when he was in his mid-20s, for Francesco Pucci, a Florentine who worked closely with the Medici. It is a holy conversation, the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints, but look how restless it is next to the balanced calm of the generation just before him. Joseph, not the Virgin, holds the Christ Child, the faces are anxious and shadowed, and the whole crowd presses forward off-balance. Vasari, who wrote the lives of the painters, singled out the colour, so vivid he said it seemed almost impossible to believe. It is one of the few Pontormos still hanging where it was first installed, in the church of San Michele Visdomini. When it was taken down for cleaning in 2012, restorers found a previously unknown sketch by his own hand on the panel.