The cryptic knot: Jacopo Pontormo’s portrait of Cosimo il Vecchio

Abstract

The ‘Portrait of Cosimo il Vecchio’, circa 1519, marked the first Medicean portrait commission of the rising young Florentine artist, Jacopo Pontormo. Over the course of his career, Pontormo tended to avoid the use of common attributes in portraiture, instead investing character and meaning in the elements of design (disegno). Though this portrait relies more heavily on traditional iconographic symbols to elicit character than some of his later portraits, even at this early stage, his use of line, colour and spatial characteristics inflect the work in original ways. And while the portrait is encomiastic, projecting the elder Cosimo’s princely status and his role as father and founder of a dynasty, visual cues modulate the overt themes of glorification and inevitability of rule that dominate the portrait, destabilizing its tone of authority. This essay explores these alternative readings of the iconography, and the reasons why they may be justified.

Keywords

• Jacopo Pontormo
• sixteenth-century Italian portraiture
• the Medici family
• disegno
• iconography
• Neo-Platonism
• visual rhetoric