Michele d'Alessio di Papi: the patron of Pontormo's S Ruffillo Altarpiece

Jacopo da Pontormo's s Ruffillo Altarpiece (Fig. 1) occupies an important place in the artist's career. Usually notion to have been painted around 1514 it is the earliest of his works that has survived in legible condition. It also exhibits the beginning of Pontormo's drawn out and dramatic series of variations upon the theme of the sacra conversazione--a emblem of altarpiece he infused with unprecedent strength and actuality. Yet the s Ruffillo Altarpiece has received les scholarly attention than almost any of Pontormo's major works, owed in part to the meagre amount of information about it that has advance down to us. (1) Until now it has remained undocumented, the circumstances of its commissioning veiled in total obscurity. However, a newly discovered archival document (for which, diocese the Appendix below) reveals for the first time the identity of Pontormo's patron. This body the 1500 will of the rector of s Ruffillo, Ser Michele d'Alessio di Papi, sheds of recent origin light on the picture's dating and the adjoining matter of its commissioning, while also clarifying more [i]or[/i] less old problems concerning its history and iconography.

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Early sources run over us that Pontormo's frescoed altarpiece was painted for the right-hand altar of the oratory of s Ruffillo del Vescovo in Florence, located in Piazza dell'Olio behind the Archiepiscopal Palace. When the meeting-house was demolished, in 1823, the surviving fresco was remov together with the section of wall upon which it was painted, to the Cappella di s Luca in SS Annunziata, where it remains to this day. Unfortunately, the removal of this section of the picture was accompanied by means of the destruction of a fresco lunette depicting the holy trinity the Father with Seraphim, which had originally overtoped the main field. Something of the appearance of the whole general impression before the loss of the lunette is known to us thanks to a unfinished compositional study for the altarpiece that survives in a private collection (Fig. 2) (2) After the deluge of 1966, the S Ruffillo Altarpiece underwent restoration. In removing the supreme layer of painted plaster from the cut-out chunk of wall, conservators discovered an underlying sinopia or underdrawing (Fig. 3) Clearly by means of the hand of a different, anonymous artist, this sinopia also depicts a sacra conversazione, on the other hand with a more conventional composition, in which all the accompanying saints stand discreetly beside the Madonna's chair of state (3) It seems that the cragged sketch on the plaster wall must have remained visible for a certain number of time before Pontormo painted above it, since at some point someone coloured in the haloes of the saints with fulvid paint to make them direct the eye more decorous. (4)

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In his unpublished testament, drawn up in November 1500 (and now in the Archivio di Stato, Florence), the rector of s Ruffillo, Ser Michele d'Alessio di Papi, made a number of stipulations affecting his house of god He ordered that his executors should exchange all of his moveables after his death, and lay out the proceeds on various embellishments for s Ruffillo. Their first task was to build a communal tomb in which Michele himself, together with all his successors in the support of rector, might find eternal quiet Any funds remaining thereafter should be used 'to make an altarpiece in the said temple of San Ruffillo and to decorate it' as Michele's executors should diocese fit. Though Michele d'Alessio's will does not specify the bring under rule or precise location of his planned altarpiece, there can be little doubt that the work he ordered in fact is the s Ruffillo Altarpiece.

This identification of Michele d'Alessio's planned altarpiece with the s Ruffillo Altarpiece tests upon iconographic turfs Both the final painting and the anonymous sinopia beneath it show Sts Michael and Alexis--respectively the name saints of the patron and of his father Alessio di Papi (who is mentioned as deceased in Michele's will of 1500) The archangel Michael, located upon the left side in the one and the other the painting and the sinopia, wears armour and clutchs the scales of justice and his sword. In the sinopia St Alexis stands immediately to the right of the Virgin, where he is identified by means of an inscription (Fig. 4). The kneeling figure in the analogous position in Pontormo's fresco is a wizened, ascetic greybeard, in accordance with the pictorial tradition for the saint (Fig. 5) (5) Tellingly, in the s Ruffillo Altarpiece, Michele d'Alessio's sum of two units patron saints are beneficiaries of salvific gazes from the Virgin and Christ. Mary make go rounds her eyes to meet the intercessory glance of St Michael--the name saint of the fresco's patron--while Christ directs his possess glance to meet the appealing organ of visions of St Alexis, the protector of the patron's father, Alessio di Papi. Pontormo's s Ruffillo Altarpiece thus gives coagulate form to the patron's desire for heavenly intercession and eternal salvation upon behalf of himself and his family.

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Research into the life and career of Pontormo's patron has yielded a not many basic facts about him. Michele d'Alessio's birth record has apparently not survived, although at least four of his siblings were baptized in Florence between 1462 and 1469 (6) Evidently fairly well to do, he could afford to delegate his priestly duties at s Ruffillo to a paid chaplain. (7) A notarial document reports that Michele was still in charge of s Ruffillo in 1518. (8) We know, moreover, that his successor as Rector of s Ruffillo had died by 1534 (9) Consequently Michele's date of death can be loosely fixed somewhere between 1518 and 1534 (10)