Two digital images of The Descent from the Cross painted in the late 1520s by Pontormo, brave pioneer of Mannerism. The version at bottom looks as if it might have undergone cleaning. Italian conservators seem to have developed an increasing reluctance to preserve any trace of what used to be known as patina.
Below, a wider sampling of the radically stylized figure-types Pontormo cultivated. His distortions owed their greatest debt to Michelangelo, whose idiosyncratic sense of proportion became for a time more compelling than nature.
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| Leda & the Swan 1512-15 |
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| Noli me tangere 1530s |
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| Joseph Sold by his Brothers to Potiphar 1515-18 |
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| Joseph in Egypt 1515-18 |
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| Seated Nude 1520 |
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| Study for the Deposition 1525 |
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| Study for a Patriarch 1525 |
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| Two Nudes 1530s |
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| Virgin & Child with Saints |
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| Annunciation 1527-28 |
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| Lunette from Vertumnus & Pomona 1520-21 |
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| Visitation 1528 |