Jacopo Carucci, born at Pontorme, near Empoli, to Bartolomeo di Jacopo di Martino Carrucci and Alessandra di Pasquale di Zanobi, had studied painting with Leonardo da Vinci upon his arrival in Florence around 1511 and then become an assistant to Andrea del Sarto, from whom he has learned the High Renaissance idiom.

Called Pontormo for his birthplace, Vasari relates how the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy and lonely," was shuttled around as a young apprentice: Jacopo had not been many months in Florence before Bernardo Vettori sent him to stay with Leonardo da Vinci, and then with Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and finally, in 1512, with Andrea del Sarto, with whom he did not remain long, for after he had done the cartoons for the arch of the Servites, it does not seem that Andrea bore him any good will, whatever the cause may have been.

Pontormo paints in and around Florence, often supported by Medici patronage.

A foray to Rome, largely to see Michelangelo's work, influences his later style.

Haunted faces and elongated bodies are characteristic of his work.

An example of Pontormo's early style is a fresco depicting the Visitation of the Virgin and St Elizabeth, with its dancelike, balanced figures, painted from 1514 to 1516.

Pontormo is much closer in style to his teacher, Andrea del Sarto, and to the early sixteenth century renaissance artistic principles.

For example, the figures stand at just under half the height of the overall picture, and although slightly more crowded than true High Renaissance balance prefers, are placed in a carefully constructed, classicizing architectural setting at a comfortable distance from the viewer.

Alonso Berruguete, born in the Spanish town of Paredes de Nava, had studied art under the tutelage of his father, the painter Pedro Berruguete.

Following his father's death in 1504, Berruguete had traveled to Italy to continue his study of art, spending most of his time in Florence and Rome.

It is here that he studies sculpture under the Italian master, Michelangelo.

His paintings produced in Italy show a mannerist influence, with his art being compared with contemporaries such as Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.

Andrea del Sarto travels briefly to France in 1518, although his crucial influences remain Raphael and the Roman High Renaissance.

Pontormo, who, after briefly studying with Leonardo, became an assistant to Andrea del Sarto, from whom he learned the High Renaissance idiom, had broken completely from the classical style by 1515, when he began his Joseph in Egypt, which he completes in 1518.

The Joseph canvases (now in the National Gallery in London) offer another example of Pontormo's developing style.

Done around the same time as the earlier Visitation, these works (such as Joseph in Egypt, at left) show a much more mannerist leaning.

According to Giorgio Vasari, the sitter for the boy seated on a step is his young apprentice, Bronzino.

Pedro Machuca had painted The Virgin and the Souls in Purgatory in 1517 the increasingly popular Mannerist style.

The details of his life are poorly known.

Born in Toledo, he is said to have been a pupil or friends with Michelangelo and Pontormo.

Returning to Spain in 1520, he works as a painter in the Royal Chapel of Granada, as well as in Jaén, Toledo, and Uclés.

The mature works of Il Rosso Fiorentino, who has become a leader of central Italian Mannerism, make clear his break with the classical style of the High Renaissance for the sake of an expressive, highly personal "anticlassicism,” exemplified by his famous Deposition, or Descent from the Cross, altarpiece in the Pinacoteca Comunale di Volterra (initially painted for the Duomo in 1521).

In contrast to the frozen grief of other depositions, this one appears as a hurried and complicated operation, while the figures below have simple and forceful expressions of quiet grief, with powerful expressions hinted at by hidden faces.

The sky is somber.

The three ladders and those carrying down Christ appear precarious.

Christ himself is sallow.

Contrast this frenetic, windswept scene with the equally complex, but more restrained composition on the same theme by the near contemporary Florentine Mannerist Pontormo, which he will complete in 1528.

Rosso will go on to paint a second, darker and more crowded Deposition altarpiece for the church of San Lorenzo in Sansepolcro.

Pontormo, in the years between the SS Annunziata and San Michele Visitations, takes part in the fresco decoration of the salon of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano, seventeen miles north-northwest of Florence.

Here in 1520 and 1521 he paints frescoes in a pastoral genre style, very uncommon for Florentine painters; their subject is the obscure classical myth of Vertumnus and Pomona in a lunette.

The work of Piero di Cosimo, a Florentine whose later paintings reflect the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, among others, remains distinguished by a uniquely personal imaginative vision and love of visual incident.

The Myth of Prometheus, a series of five panels painted by Piero, shows Prometheus standing before a life-size statue.

His undated “Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs” displays an energetic urgency reminiscent of Luca Signorelli.

He dies in his late fifties.

Vasari gives Piero's date of death as 1521, and this date is still repeated by many sources.

However, contemporary documents reveal that he died of plague on April 12, 1522.

Italian poet and dramatist Luigi Alamanni, a friend of Niccolo Machiavelli, is involved in an unsuccessful conspiracy against Cardinal Giulio de Medici in 1522.

Alamanni flees Florence for France, where he becomes court poet to King Francis.

Rosso Fiorentino, born in Florence with the red hair that gave him his nickname, had first trained in the studio of Andrea del Sarto alongside his contemporary, Pontormo.

Rosso moves in late 1523 to Rome, where he is exposed to the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and other Renaissance artists, resulting in the realignment of his artistic style, becoming somewhat more reconciled to classicism.

The large altarpiece canvas for the Brunelleschi-designed Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita, Florence, portraying The Deposition from the Cross, is considered by many Pontormo's surviving masterpiece (1528).

The figures, with their sharply modeled forms and brilliant colors are united in an enormously complex, swirling ovular composition, housed by a shallow, somewhat flattened space.

Although commonly known as The Deposition from the Cross, there is no actual cross in the picture.

The scene might more properly be called a Lamentation or Bearing the Body of Christ.

Those who are lowering (or supporting) Christ appear as anguished as the mourners.

Though they are bearing the weight of a full-grown man, they barely seem to be touching the ground; the lower figure in particular balances delicately and implausibly on his front two toes.

These two boys have sometimes been interpreted as angels, carrying Christ in his journey to Heaven.

In this case, the subject of the picture would be more akin to an Entombment, though the lack of any discernible tomb disrupts that theory, just as the lack of cross poses a problem for the Deposition interpretation.

Finally, it has also been noted that the positions of Christ and the Virgin seem to echo those of Michelangelo's Pietà in Rome, though here in the Deposition mother and son have been separated.

Thus in addition to elements of a Lamentation and Entombment, this picture carries hints of a Pietà.

It has been speculated that the bearded figure in the background at the far right is a self-portrait of Pontormo as Joseph of Arimathea.

Another unique feature of this particular Deposition is the empty space occupying the central pictorial plane as all the Biblical personages seem to fall back from this point.

It has been suggested that this emptiness may be a physical representation of the Virgin Mary's emotional emptiness at the prospect of losing her son.

Pontormo paints The Visitation in 1530 for the Church of San Francesco e Michele in Carmignano, depicting the meeting of the Virgin Mary and Saint Elizabeth, whose swirling drapery, elegantly poised figures and heightened colors exemplify his Mannerist style.