subject of the work being Our Saviour Christ appearing to the Magdalen in the garden; and the Marchese made a great point of having the picture executed by Puntormo, since Buonarroti had told him that none could serve him better than that artist. The commission oeing accepted by Jacopo, he completed the work accordingly, and that to such perfection, as to cause the painting to be esteemed a most rare performance, the grandeur of Michelagnolo’s design being added to the colouring of Jacopo da Puntormo; wherefore this picture having been seen by the Signor Alessandro Vitelli, who was then in Florence, where he held the office of Captain of the Guard, he caused a painting to be executed for himself by Jacopo from the same cartoon, and this he then sent to Citta di Castello, commanding that it should be placed in the dwelling which he possessed there.
The esteem in which Michelagnolo held Puntormo becoming known, and the care with which the latter had put the designs and cartoons of Michelagnolo into painting, with the excellence of those works, being much bruited abroad, Bartolommeo Bettini took much pains to procure for himself a cartoon from Buonarroti, who was his very intimate friend; and, finally succeeding, he obtained from that master a nude figure of Yenus, whom her son Cupid is caressing. This he had done with the intention of having the work made a picture by Jacopo Puntormo, and placed in the centre of one of his rooms, Bronzino having already begun to paint figures of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio in the lunettes of the same, and Bettini proposing eventually to have those of all the other poets, who, whether in verse or prose, have sung the triumphs of Love in Tuscan. Jacopo received the cartoon accordingly, and painted the picture at his leisure as will be related, but in that manner and to that perfection which is known to all the world, insomuch that I need not add my commendations.[1]
Incited by these designs of Michelagnolo, and carefully considering the manner of that most noble artist, Puntormo
- ↑ “Vasari has expressed himself thus,” remarks a compatriot of our author, “because the historian Varchi had just then been singing the praises of this work in one of his lectures which was much read at that time, and wherein he (Varchi) compares this Venus to that of Praxiteles, with which, according to Pliny, the men who beheld it fell in love.”
