Pontormo's Libro mio Reconsidered Alongside Two 1556 Volumes at Scuderie del Quirinale

The Scuderie del Quirinale opens today the largest monographic exhibition ever devoted to Pontormo. The catalogue, published by Electa and edited by Cristina Acidini, includes a focus on the Libro mio, the few diary pages the painter wrote in the final years of his life, which more than any of his paintings helped construct the image of Pontormo as a misanthrope, hypochondriac, and man obsessed with his own body. The article proposes another way of reading that diary: placing it beside two books that apparently have nothing to do with him. The author notes having recently realized that three of the sixteenth-century books he loves most intersect in the same two years. They are not the three representative books of 1556, and hundreds of ricordi were written in those years: they are his three, and he discovered the coincidence within a predilection that already existed. The first is the Libro di spese diverse.