Disegno and desire in Pontormo's Alessandro de’ Medici

ABSTRACTPontormo's portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici (c. 1534–35), showing the duke drawing a portrait of his beloved, cleverly engages with the history and fictive nature of art‐making. Pliny's tale about the invention of drawing forms one resonance, Castiglione's praise of the noble art of drawing another, the theorization of disegno by Vasari and others yet a third. Poetic conventions about the picturing of the beloved inform the image of a ruler who is presented as a courtly lover, adept observer, discerning patron, Medicean loyalist, and cultivated prince. Layers of presence and absence, naturalism and idealism are at work in the image, which addresses the perspicacity of sight and the poetics of its very making. The duke adopts a mythic persona but so too does the painter endow his craft with a distinguished pedigree, ranging from Pliny, Petrarch and poets like Lorenzo de’ Medici to the era's notions of perceptual psychology, amorous imprinting and the conceptual basis of disegno.