In 1956, Palazzo Strozzi hosted the exhibition Pontormo and Early Florentine Mannerism, in which Pontormo's work was displayed alongside that of Rosso Fiorentino, Beccafumi and other adepts of the new and unconventional trend in painting. Almost sixty years later, Palazzo Strozzi has decided to hold an exhibtion devoted to only two of that movement's leading lights, Pontormo and Rosso Fiordentino. They were both born in 1494, at the close of a century which had seen the collapse of a political balance that has guaranteed the prosperity and security of Florence and of Italy as a whole, and at the start of a troubled era of religious and political unrest that was to lead to a definitive alteration of the political balances among states, and to the loss of the harmony and balance in art that had been such a feature of the transition from the 15th to the 16th century. In exploring the work of the two greatest Florentine exponents of what 20th-century critics christened Mannerism, the exhibition, and this accompanying volume, aims to track the chronological development of the movement. With essays by Philippe Costamagna, Elizabeth Cropper, Carlo Falciani, Massimo Firpo, Tommaso Mozzati, Antonio Natali, Alessandro Nova, Massimiliano Rossi, and with entries by Grazia Badino, Andrea Baldinotti, Elena Capretti, Philippe Costamagna, Francesca De Luca, Carlo Falciani, Giovanni Maria Fara, David Franklin, Cristina Gelli, Antonio Geremicca, Giovanna Giusti, Sefy Hendler, Andrea Muzzi, Carol Plazzotta.
