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Witness to a Miracle
John Haberin New York City
Jacopo da Pontormo: The Visitation
What if the witnesses to a miracle were looking at you? They do for Jacopo da Pontormo, in his Visitation at the Morgan Library, but do not be too quick to congratulate yourself on your godliness. Along with a rarely seen portrait, it shows the Florentine artist's and his city's "Miraculous Encounters."
The witnesses stare fixedly ahead, like an accusation or a vision. They could be confronting evil, and you could be seeing ghosts. Even today in English a visitation can be any experience of the supernatural—a never less than unsettling experience for Pontormo. Yet it holds a very specific meaning for the Catholic Church and Renaissance art. These witnesses stare out from behind two other women, the painting's main actors, and the visitation is theirs. They are coming together for a human touch in the otherworldly face of a miracle. 
Not every Renaissance painting has sprung to life in performance, but this one has, in a video by Bill Viola. It is all the more haunting in person, without Viola's heavy hand, for standing stock still. Nor can every Renaissance panel look comfortable on a shelf in a small room, shorn of its frame, its top edge resting on the wall. And this one does not, for which it has only a museum to blame. Still, Pontormo's encounters are not bringing comfort. They are bringing news.
Good and bad news
For starters, they are bringing news to one another. The Virgin Mary, newly pregnant with a son of god, is sharing her joy with a dear relative. Elizabeth in turn has news of her own, for she will give birth to another witness to Jesus, John the Baptist. Through painting, as through the legend itself, they are also bringing the news to you. The tale occurs only in Luke, the Gospel most concerned with bearing news to the gentiles—and so concerned with wrapping things up tidily that John, too, is all in the family. One can see why the subject appealed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, a painter of emerging middle-class values like family and the teacher of Michelangelo, or to Raphael.
Something, though, stands in the way of the good news, only beginning with the witnesses. One stands behind and between the protagonists, as if determined to keep them apart. The other stands behind Mary's back, like a guilty conscience. For all four women, this is a perilous moment, on the threshold of new births and a new order. Mary and Elizabeth reach out and touch one another, but just short of an embrace, and their faces mix joy with something far more serious. They in turn keep the witnesses, if only barely, at one remove from the viewer.
Everything here is both too close and too far. The feet of all four rest barely within the painting's borders and almost as large as life. Yet the figures bar the viewer's passage and remain out of reach. The narrow passage presses in as well. Steps come uncomfortably close to Elizabeth's back, as if her very home has refused her entrance. Buildings across the street appear close as well, but a puzzling perspective makes its unidentified residents incomprehensibly occupied and incomprehensibly small—the only two now visible, to judge by a near final drawing that lacks them, added at very the last minute. They are definitely not bearing witness.
They belong instead to Pontormo's first love, Renaissance Florence, but the news there was not at all good. The painting today resides barely ten miles west of the city, in Carmignano. You can forgive yourself if your day trips from Florence took you instead to Padua, for Giotto, or to Arezzo, for Piero della Francesca and what the Met in 2014 called Piero's "Personal Encounters." Pontormo's Visitation long remained under the radar for art history as well. Still, a recent cleaning has brought it new attention and a later date, 1528 or 1529. For the artist, not yet thirty, it was a perilous year.
Yet another war was about to bring the Florentine republic to an end once and for all. Nor was Italy above the turmoil everywhere in Europe. If those witnesses appear to have returned from the dead, Martin Luther and the Reformation had called purgatory into question. (It is not, after all, in the Bible.) Think of Hamlet's need of five acts to put his father's ghost to the test—"doomed for a certain time to walk the earth." Shakespeare being Shakespeare, scholars still debate just what he believed.
So much loomed over Pontormo, and this artist did not bear anything lightly. In the first generation of Mannerism, what I have called (after Postmodernism) the Post-Renaissance, he was also putting the Renaissance to the test. His figures have the fullness of Michelangelo, who praised him, and the cleaning brings out the vivid color of their dress—much as cleaning has brought out similar colors in the Sistine Chapel. Yet Pontormo heightens them, as if under a fluorescent light. They also play out against a darkening sky and the street's field of gray. As with perspective, he was not casting aside his predecessors, but rather embracing their precision in order to turn it against itself.
The double
He also bears witness—or witnesses. Often as not, painters of the Visitation set Mary and Elizabeth apart from anyone else, even in a crowded landscape. When a pair does accompany them, as for Piero di Cosimo around 1490 (a painting now in the National Gallery in Washington), they may not pay the least attention, for they are simply a donor's attendant saints. Pontormo's version comes closest to Ghirlandaio's from 1491 in the Louvre, but even there one saint looks away. For Pontormo, the witnesses could not be closer to the action, and only he refuses to identify them. They might be reflections of the central figures or their dark unconscious.
Their look, young and old, is almost identical to that of Mary and Elizabeth, only face on rather than in profile. The shocking pink of one picks up on Mary's head scarf, in contrast to Mary's robe in its traditional royal blue. The other's dull cloak suggests a faded version of Elizabeth's costly green and orange. The four come together in a slow-motion dance, with Elizabeth's left foot on her toes. They could be the three Graces of classic art, and the woman at the left even wears a wreath on her head. As with the four witches by Albrecht Dürer, a source for Pontormo, there just happens to be one woman too many.
One does not need Sigmund Freud to see the witnesses as a doubling and a double as the experience of the uncanny. Freud elevates that experience to the superego, the very source of a conscience, and sure enough the witnesses are witnessing you. They are also making the private public, much like therapy, and that may be a clue to their strangeness, too. The Nativity, or infancy of Jesus, is a public occasion, in which shepherds or wise men bear witness to a miracle. Like an Annunciation, a Visitation is more intimate, a one-one-one encounter with family and the divine—at least in theory. For Pontormo, it is not so easy or so comforting to sort out the supernatural and the human.
The Morgan hedges its bets by calling the small show "Miraculous Encounters." You get to decide on the encounter and the miracle. It adds a preparatory drawing, already gridded for transfer to panel, and a sketch in red chalk of the artist himself—on his way to bearing witness in painting to still another scene of piety and terror, a slow-motion Entombment. It also adds a double of its own, in Pontormo's Young Man in a Red Cap. One of just fifteen surviving Pontormo portraits, it dates from barely a year after the Visitation, and it, too, depicts a crisis. It takes the point of view of two young men, the artist and his subject, faced with threats to Florence.
A young aristocrat, probably Carlo Neroni, stands with one hand ready to reach for his sword. The other grasps a folded note that may once have identified him, although its message is now lost. The figure is attenuated, and his limbs when they protrude from his dark clothing may never quite add up, but that only adds to the tension. The man's pose, with one arm raised just short of action, recalls Michelangelo's David, and his red cap recalls a portrait by Titian in the Frick Collection. Yet this young man trades Titian's luxury for simple black clothes and a smaller spot of red in his cap. He is an aristocrat in name and bearing, but in defense of a republic.
One last drawing shows another young man enlisted in the same defense. It was a doomed resistance, and the painted portrait has suffered its own crisis since turning up in a private collection just a few years back. The National Gallery of Art in London bid high to keep it in England, but it is not coming back. Is the Visitation the desired miracle or only a haunting? Mary is expecting, but art after the High Renaissance had lost a common cause and a common language. For a short while, it gained in their place a disturbingly uncommon vision.
Jacopo da Pontormo ran at The Morgan Library through January 6, 2019. A related review looks further at Pontormo portraits, Mannerism, and (yes) that video by Bill Viola.