Writing historiography is one of the most self-revealing acts an art historian is likely to perform. That is probably why many eminent scholars have kept well away from it. To confront Giorgio Vasari’s personal prejudices, jealousies and hatreds, and silences and suppressions of fact is to come into critical conflict with the mainstream of art-historical interpretation—the lengthy, authoritative tradition of credence given to the biographer. Paul Barolsky found his own gentle and inimitable way around this problem in his valuable monographic reassessments of the literary themes in Vasari’s Vite. For most scholars, however, the way to expose Vasari’s animus is either to demonstrate his unacknowledged pictorial dependence upon the work of his contemporaries or to find the archival documents that give the lie to certain details in his biographies. My friend Richard Goldthwaite has expressed the view that art historians (as distinct from economic historians) are amusing in their passion for thanking each other in their publications. He may be right in thinking that we, unlike Vasari, are excessive in charting the paths of our indebtedness. One might suspect that the surface gentilezza of art history is related—in part at least—to dependence upon the generosity of possessors of works of art, to the need to establish good graces with institutions whose beneficence may in the long term be crucial to one’s professional survival.

To find “new” documents on a Renaissance artist is the dream of many an art historian. Archival documents have an aura about them. Their discovery is normally tied to the individual who “unearths” them and who presents their text to a grateful scholarly community. Documents seem to have an enviable concreteness, an incontrovertible authenticity, even if they sometimes precipitate fresh complications of interpretation, muddying the clear waters of established scholarship. Compared with the mere “opinion” of iconographic analysis or the mysteriously personal judgment of connoisseurship, archival texts compel a response. To decline engagement with another scholar’s interpretation of a work of art may disclose inadequate research or sheer discomfort with their importunate presence in the field. But to be unaware that a document already exists in the scholarly discourse, that the contract has been found, the account book published—that is more difficult to explain.

As Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz speculated in Die Legende vom Künstler: ein geschichtlicher Versuch (Vienna: Krystall-Verlag, 1934), the irresistible urge to know more about artists’ lives may be connected to the fervent desire of art lovers to marvel at the magical powers of genius. Tropic anecdotes about the prodigious skills of artists seem to feed this hunger. Documents recording the daily life of artists can, however, serve to challenge fondly held beliefs about artists’ lives propagated by a partisan biographer like Vasari. Elizabeth Pilliod, the author of the book under review, Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Florentine Art, cites Don Vincenzo Borghini’s sober advice proffered to Vasari, that he ought not “include domestic or personal detail in the Lives because these were artisans, not great men” (111).

Pilliod’s book is much concerned with Vasari’s silences with regard to the artistic and personal lives of Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Alessandro Allori. She produces archival evidence that documents the intimate social and professional relations among these three men and their friends and patrons. It has to be said that a great deal of new information has been brought to light in this investigation. But, as Pilliod acknowledges, the path into this material was blazed, albeit imperfectly, more than a century ago by Albertina Furno in her modest but highly predictive book, La vita e le rime di Agniolo Bronzino (Pistoia: Flori, 1902). As Pilliod notes, it was Furno who first “provided an impressive cache of documentary sources” (98) for the investigation of Bronzino’s familial origins, his birth, baptism, and death records, and his puzzling relations with the Allori. And it was Furno, at a time when the Archivio di Stato files in Florence must have been much less accessible, who began to read into the Medici correspondence of the ducal period and who raised the possibility that the biographical issues concerning Bronzino might be approached through his poetry. Furno got some of it wrong, but this reviewer can honestly state that following her tracks into the Archivio was an enlightening experience.

Pilliod’s first chapter spells out just how much Vasari and the biographers who followed him did not tell us about Pontormo, Bronzino, and Allori that we feel we, as modern scholars, ought to know. She argues that since the Second World War, such factors as a broad reassessment of the merits of Mannerism as a style, “the triumphs of the approach of the connoisseur” (8), iconographic research, and the social history of artists had led scholars to revisit Vasari’s text for “clues to deciphering the meanings of works by these artists” (8). Nevertheless, Pilliod maintains that before her book “no monograph or article has seriously challenged [Vasari’s] facts regarding Pontormo, Bronzino, or Allori” (9). This is a bold claim. Its accuracy would depend on how much weight one attributed to the word “seriously.” A number of scholars might well feel that they have persistently addressed, in various ways, the question of Vasari’s reliability in relation to these artists. Leaving this problem aside, however, one must acknowledge that Pilliod produces impressive new archival evidence in chapter 2 regarding Pontormo’s salary for the work he executed at the Medici villa at Castello (confirming, ironically, the accuracy of Vasari’s report), and she nicely contextualizes the accounts and their payees. The author rightly deplores Vasari’s diminution of the importance of Pontormo’s San Lorenzo choir commission. In chapter 3, her account of Pontormo’s workshop, of his intrusive, domineering role as a teacher, and of Vasari’s silences regarding his assistants is all of considerable interest.

Chapter 4 traverses ground already well tilled by Craig Hugh Smyth and Janet Cox-Rearick, as is fully acknowledged in the footnotes. Here one feels that Pilliod, making numerous adjustments to the judgments of her predecessors in connoisseurship, engages in a cumulative critical process that yields positive results. Chapter 5, on Pontormo’s house—one of the most intriguing aspects of Vasari’s account—shows the author’s archival analysis at its best. Pontormo was indeed a loner, but his house, with its “little attic room” (75), was not as weird as it might have seemed to the upwardly mobile Vasari.

Chapter 6, which draws from a good mix of archival, textual, and visual evidence and fills out a neglected dimension in the scholarship, explores how Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Allori family engaged with local confraternities. Chapter 7 is one of the strongest of the book, depending on some very striking archival evidence about Bronzino’s financial and familial dealings with the Allori.¹ It should, however, be mentioned that the present reviewer’s publication of a section of perhaps the most interesting of the documents on Bronzino (Pilliod’s doc. 18a) a decade earlier has been overlooked in the present volume.² Pilliod considers some of Bronzino’s poems here, but the account could have been enriched by integrating further material on Bronzino’s working life from Deborah Parker’s Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which admittedly appeared late in the book’s preparation but which Pilliod cites in her bibliography and mentions in an endnote (88, n. 41, at 251).

Chapter 8 offers an illuminating account that clarifies, on the basis of new archival evidence and some sound connoisseurship, the dispute over Pontormo’s estate. Chapter 9 takes us into Allori’s work in the Montauto chapel in Santissima Annunziata, explored against the background of Vasari’s envious rivalry, Michelangelo’s generosity to Allori in respect of copying drawings, and the identification of the numerous portraits. Chapter 10 renews the book’s initial assault on Vasari’s begrudging, mendacious, belittling account of the three artists central to this study, yet Pilliod’s thoughtful account embraces the main lines of research into the genesis of Vasari’s two versions of the Vite, his own role as court artist and as promoter of the Accademia del Disegno, and, in particular, his relations with Don Vincenzo Borghini, Duke Cosimo’s luogotenente of the artists’ academy. Vasari certainly diminished the importance of the roles of Pontormo, Bronzino, and Allori in the duke’s early patronage. Vasari did not, however, cover up “the profoundly literate basis” (211) of Bronzino’s art, having freely acknowledged the artist’s competence in poetry.

Pilliod’s call in this final chapter for the restoration “to the forefront of Florentine studies” of the “multivalent connections between literary and visual artists that informed Florentine culture” (211) rings somewhat hollow when one considers that her own emphasis throughout the book is on the transforming importance of archival evidence and of connoisseurship. We still need some sustained investigation of the range of reading employed by this literate group of artists in the development of their artistic projects. Overall, though, Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori is an absorbing and challenging book, and one that needed to be written.