The first thing that strikes anyone who picks up Elizabeth Pilliod’s new book is its heft. With thick, glossy pages and rich images, Pontormo at San Lorenzo: The Making and Meaning of a Lost Renaissance Masterpiece feels like a work of substance (and it is), but the study itself is not overly long. An introduction and five chapters add up to two hundred twenty-six folio-sized pages of single-columned text. Of perhaps equal importance are two additional elements. The first is an appendix with color-coded tables that map the descriptions of Pontormo’s lost paintings in early sources. The second is a Document Register; this includes transcriptions, English-language summaries, and citations for the four hundred forty-four archival documents that the author consulted. The Document Register alone would guarantee Pontormo at San Lorenzo a place in university libraries, but there are also many reasons scholars might want to add this volume to their personal collections as well (the price notwithstanding). Anyone interested in Pontormo, sixteenth-century Florence, the patronage of Cosimo I de’Medici, or the complex interactions among art, the liturgy, and relics will find much to appreciate in Pilliod’s courageous book.

I say “courageous,” and I mean it, for Pilliod set herself a considerable challenge. Jacopo da Pontormo spent more than a decade painting the choir of San Lorenzo, one of the most important churches in the city of Florence. The artist died in 1557, leaving the project incomplete. His assistants finished the work about a year later, but the frescoes were destroyed in 1738. No complete copies survive, and the critical reception of Pontormo’s compositions leaves much to be desired. Previous commentators stress the artist’s supposedly eccentric and reclusive personality or else frame his project as an inelegant expression of unorthodox religious beliefs.

Pilliod confronts these difficulties by subjecting the available evidence to new levels of scrutiny and by returning to the archive. With surgical precision, she cuts through the complicated historiography surrounding Pontormo and reveals the supreme artistry that once graced the walls of San Lorenzo’s choir. As she convincingly demonstrates, moreover, Pontormo’s artistry not only conveyed an orthodox message regarding God’s plan for humanity’s salvation. It also functioned within the “living context” (9) of a Renaissance church.

Chapter one describes that “living context.” Pilliod begins by questioning an allegation that underpins the artist’s reputation for being reclusive: namely, Giorgio Vasari’s claim that Pontormo sealed off the choir for eleven years. This is where Pilliod’s archival research shines brightest. Readers learn about Pontormo’s assistants, his studio space, and the patronage practices of Cosimo I. They also learn about the timeline of Pontormo’s work: hitherto unknown documents date the commission to 1542–3. By May 1544, the artist had progressed to the cartoon stage, which involved pikes. Once on site, the pace of his day-to-day activities was irregular. Pontormo had to deal with any number of small, quotidian interruptions (for instance, routine building maintenance). He paused work when the cannons held services in the choir—a daily obligation. He likewise had to accommodate the myriad spectacles that took place within the church; several notable funerals occurred in San Lorenzo during the years of his employ, for example, and each celebration involved the apse. By the end of the chapter, readers are forced to conclude with Pilliod that, far from being inaccessible, “scores of people entered [the choir] every week” (61).

Chapter two begins the work of reconstructing what those scores of people saw when they looked upon the choir’s painted walls. Here, Pilliod turns her attention to those early sources that provide written descriptions of Pontormo’s scenes, to Pontormo’s drawings, and to a set of engravings that commemorate the 1598 funeral in absentia of Philip II, King of Spain. The forth engraving in the set captures the upper portion of Pontormo’s frescoes on the back wall. Scholars have known about this image since 1950, but—as Pilliod reveals—they have been viewing it in reverse, mistakenly flipping Pontormo’s imagery in every attempt to reconstruct his compositions. Correcting this mistake has the added benefit of throwing Pontormo’s methods for developing and using his preparatory drawings into sharp relief. The artist toyed with his designs, executed them on different scales, and studied poses from multiple angles, often with the aid of sculptural models and mirrors. In every respect, Pontormo considered the relationship between his figures and their architectural setting: the light in San Lorenzo was a pressing concern, for instance. Pilliod’s analysis of Pontormo’s drawings is—at least in the eyes of this reader—one of the real highlights of the book. I suspect students in advanced undergraduate and graduate-level seminars would agree.

Pilliod next turns to the issue of meaning. In chapter three, she connects the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence on the choir’s end wall to the liturgical celebrations centered on the high altar, the saint’s relics, and the memory of Cosimo the Elder. This line of investigation invites consideration of the spectator: “For a viewer stationed in the nave . . . Pontormo’s fresco of Saint Lawrence was seen as if hovering above the altar table. The altar candles were in front of the image, and their flames may have visually ‘touched’ his body” (110). That last idea recalls the saint’s manner of death (he burned on a gridiron), but it also relates to a famous sermon ascribed to St. Ambrose, the bishop who consecrated San Lorenzo in 393 CE. The sermon tells of Lawrence descending into Purgatory every Wednesday and, in imitation of his own martyrdom, freeing souls from the agony of the purifying fires. The belief in Lawrence’s intercessory powers was real among the Florentines of Pontormo’s day. And for Pilliod, that belief clarifies the subject matter of the choir’s end wall: Pontormo’s paintings describe the “Immediate Judgment,” the moment between death and a soul’s descent into Purgatory, with Lawrence, patron saint of San Lorenzo, acting as an agent of salvation.

Chapter four brings Pilliod to the scenes on the side walls. Most come from the Old Testament; all relate to the ideas of sin and judgment, as expressed in “Early Christian concepts, practices, and texts” (132). St. Gregory the Great’s allegorical writings on the history of salvation and the five ages of humanity prove especially important, as do the services held in San Lorenzo on Septuagesima, the ninth Sunday before Easter. With searching insight, Pilliod demonstrates that Pontormo’s scenes speak to each other in multiple and multivalent ways, inviting viewers to reflect on themes relevant to the promise of redemption. Those themes play out across San Lorenzo’s interior. In due course, Pilliod turns from the choir, looks down at the floor monument of Cosimo the Elder, takes note of the church’s other grave markers, and then approaches Michelangelo’s reliquary tribune (an ornate balcony that housed sacred relics above the church’s main door). The connections she traces would have been particularly charged during Holy Week, for as Pilliod explains, “On Easter the crowds who attended San Lorenzo could imagine the resurrection of the bodies of the dead interred throughout the church mingling with those of the saints, as all emerged from the ground or burst from the priceless vases that imprisoned them to rise towards the heavens. The way to salvation drawn out on the choir’s walls would have reached its logical conclusion” (183).

Pilliod concludes her study with a final chapter devoted to the afterlife of the choir frescoes. She tells the story of their destruction, noting that some fragments survived to become framed roundels of expressive heads in the eighteenth century. These were few, and sadly, the commemorative portrait of Pontormo added to the choir after the master’s death was not among them—though Pilliod offers a thought-provoking interpretation of what it meant for the artist to join the depicted souls in Purgatory. In a similar vein, she considers how this portrayal anticipates the posthumous honors Pontormo received from the Accademia del Disegno, as well as the “echoes” (226) of his lost frescoes in the work of later artists.

I have a few final words of advice for the reader who picks up Pontormo at San Lorenzo. Be patient.  The nature of writing about lost frescoes means that Pontormo’s paintings emerge slowly within the text. Similarly, Pilliod’s interest in the “living context” (9) of San Lorenzo opens up some thrilling if potentially tangential lines of investigation. She uncovers previously unknown facts about the history of Fra Bartolomeo’s St. Anne altarpiece and about the interment of the Medici capitani in the New Sacristy. Short sections within her chapters provide novel insights related to things such as ceremonial objects and painted portraits of Duke Cosimo’s children. While these discoveries will fascinate the curious reader, they may occasionally frustrate a reader who comes to the text with a strict agenda and tight schedule. Be curious. Time is almost always a precious commodity, but this is a book that is worth the investment.