The Visitation by Pontormo and The Assumption by Rosso
When visiting any museum with large holdings of Italian Renaissance paintings, it’s impossible not to notice how carefully the Florentine and the Venetian masters are segregated, if not in separate rooms, then surely on different walls. This is consistent with a long-held view that has identified the two schools according to their distinct and quite different qualities—drawing in Florence vs. color in Venice, for example. This view traces its origins to none other than Giorgio Vasari’s mid-sixteenth-century series of artist biographies, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, and has echoed through the centuries, acquiring the status of a self-evident truth.
If ever the notion of a Florence–Venice juxtaposition had been in doubt, a leisurely visit to Italy this past spring and summer would have affirmed its veracity. Two lavishly arranged exhibitions paid homage to a threesome of the era’s geniuses: Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino in Florence and Paolo Veronese in Verona. The bountiful rewards of these collective efforts, in terms of art-historical research, conservation campaigns, and pure enjoyment, included, as valuable dividends, two excellently prepared catalogues that will serve as references for decades to come. Although Italians lament their continuing economic malaise—la crisi of which everyone speaks—it seems hardly perceptible in light of these ambitious and lavishly staged undertakings by that country’s museums and cultural entities.
Not surprisingly, Florence, the undisputed wellspring of the Italian Renaissance,
