Justification and Grace in the Sala dei Cento Giorni: Tridentine Influences in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite

Abstract

IN 1546 THE DUKE OF FLORENCE Cosimo I de’ Medici commissioned the painter Jacopo Pontormo to decorate Brunelleschi’s choir in the church of San Lorenzo. For the next decade, Pontormo worked on his fresco cycle that remained incomplete upon the painter’s death in 1557. Agnolo Bronzino eventually completed the choir, which was unveiled on July 23, 1558, but Pontormo had probably finished the upper zone of the choir in 1550, and he had also executed three large frescoes below the cornice with a Deluge and several sections of the Resurrection of the Dead. Bronzino then completed the remaining parts of Pontormo’s Resurrection by adding other scenes in the lower section. The finished decoration of the choir was unfortunately destroyed in the rebuilding of the church’s lateral walls in 1738, but the Florentine diarist Agostino Lapini immediately remarked after the choir’s public unveiling in 1558 that these scenes entailed several perplexities. Baccio Bandinelli went further when he accused Pontormo of having “offended the devotion of that church.”