I chose to compare Pontormo’s “Entombment” and Parmigianino’s “Madonna with the Long Neck.” They both depict well known religious subject matter, but, instead of a sense of piousness or godliness, each work describes a disturbance to me.

The entombment has grieving figures taking Christ’s body to the grave. No one is really looking at anything in particular; they all are spacing out in their own directions. The (living) bodies are leaning this way and that way as if they’re marionettes in the hands of an inept puppeteer – as if gravity is pulling harder on their torsos than their legs and feet which seem to be pushing away from and barely touching the ground.  It is unquestionably despairing, like everyone just wants to fall over and give up, but they can’t. Christ got to die and go limp, but everyone else has to suffer and live and stand up. Life is so unfair.

As for the “Madonna with the Long Neck,” I don’t really know what to make of it. The easy answer is that it is the Madonna and Child, but I really don’t want to accept that as a reliable and solid interpretation. A good Madonna would not be so happy and pleased to have such a lifeless looking child falling out of her lap.  The child has the limpness of the Christ form Pontormo’s “Entombment” so I want to associate this image with Christ’s death, but the surrounding figures of these works have opposite reactions. Pontormo’s people are freaking out, falling over themselves thinking it’s the end of the world while Parmigianino’s are touched by this limp thing’s beauty or whatever. It’s just weird.

Formally, Parmigianino’s piece is going to extremes to showcase the Mannerist proportions of humans.  Limbs and digits are excessively lengthy. The toes look a little like they could belong to gorillas. This work also utilizes awkward, unstable positions that a normal human being would not be particularly comfortable staying in. The child is sliding off the lap, the Madonna should be slipping off of her throne, and the admiring figures to her right, I think, are contorting their bodies at least some to be seen in a “graceful” pose. The columns in the back add a strange perspective that doesn’t fit with the small figure in the right-hand corner. They also don’t make sense left as they are with no functional purpose. All this sums up to another Mannerism trait: it disturbs me. The tenderness and pride the figures show toward the dead looking child is unsettling. It reflects how people at the time, and possibly the artist, are not sure what to make of their own religion anymore.  The Catholic faith, which had been a constant for centuries, was revealed to be corrupt and alarmingly twisted from its original state. They wanted to retain their faith and religious images, but the church was changing and did not provide any stability, just like the visual compositions of the time. Also, I personally think this Madonna’s eyes look like they are popping out too far, adding an extra bit of creepiness to the painting.

Pontormo’s work has some equally troubling qualities, aside from everyone being jealous of Christ’s limpness. The weird little man from the corner of Parmigianino’s Madonna and Child painting has an equivalent in the one random cloud in Pontormo’s “Entombment.” It’s just there being completely unrelated to everything else. The weird perspective I found in the Parmigianino’s columns I equate to the Entombments weird, crouching person in the front. His back looks like it’s reflecting something pink, and his stomach looks like it’s reflecting something blue. Meanwhile, there’re blue clothes behind him and pink and orange clothes on his other side. These things work against each other, or rather they work together to confuse my mental understanding of what I’m seeing. Both of these works display upsetness with the basic, run-of-the-mill religious images the artists and audiences were taught to believe in. Frankly, the results hurt my brain.