Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi?)
Jacopo Pontormo (1494 to 1557) · about 1529 to 1530
A very young soldier stands before a fortress wall, one hand on his hip, the other gripping a halberd, and stares straight at you with a mixture of swagger and nerves. He wears a red cap with a feather, a tight red doublet with slashed sleeves, and a sword at his belt, and his smooth face makes it clear he is a teenager playing at being a man. Pontormo painted him during the siege of Florence around fifteen twenty nine, when the city's republic was fighting for its life against the Medici and their imperial allies, and boys really were called to the walls.
The pose comes from the fashion for portraits of dignified men by Bronzino and others, but Pontormo unsettles it. The body twists slightly, the feet are not quite planted, and the pale green background offers no depth to rest in. Look at the elongated fingers, the sharp lighting on the face and the cool, almost enamel like surface, all hallmarks of the Florentine style called Mannerism, of which Pontormo was the founder. The colours were transferred from the original wooden panel to canvas long ago, yet the painting keeps an extraordinary freshness.
Who he is has been argued over for centuries. Giorgio Vasari wrote that Pontormo painted the young nobleman Francesco Guardi as a soldier during the siege, and a boy of that name was born in fifteen fourteen, which fits. Others have proposed the young Cosimo de' Medici, who later became Grand Duke. When the Getty bought the picture at auction in nineteen eighty nine for about thirty five million dollars, it set a record for an Old Master painting and announced that the new museum meant business.
Did You Know? The halberd he holds combines a spear and an axe, a weapon that would have been almost as tall as the boy himself.
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