Rosso Fiorentino, "Study Of A Seated Nude", 1525-27 (image courtesy of the British Museum)

What about Pontormo? His drawings are phenomenal. There is one of a man pointing directly at the viewer that makes you gasp, such is the virtuosity of the foreshortening. Vasari maintained that Pontormo's late paintings were spoiled by his inability to come to terms with Michelangelo's influence and a failed attempt to outdo the grandeur of the Sistine Chapel. It is hard to assess that claim, which until recently was accepted without serious scrutiny. The fresco cycle of which Vasari thought it was most obviously true — a series of Biblical scenes from the Creation to the Last Judgment and Apocalypse that Pontormo painted in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence — no longer exists. It was destroyed in 1742 because its images came to be thought of as heretical. Don't ask me how a picture can be heretical, but apparently it can: Pontormo's frescoes in San Lorenzo were alleged to have celebrated the Lutheran doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone, which was and is inimical to Catholic orthodoxy.

Was Pontormo oppressed by the need to imitate and to surpass Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel? As far as we know, Pontormo visited Rome only once, in 1511, when he was in his teens. The Sistine ceiling had not yet been finished. Michelangelo was doing his best to make sure that no one was allowed to view it. Was Pontormo able to get a sneak preview? Perhaps, but no one knows. As for The Last Judgment, Michelangelo's huge fresco on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel, it wasn't started until 1536 and wasn't finished until 1541 (the year, incidentally, after Rosso died). There is no evidence that Pontormo ever saw it. While Pontormo certainly executed at least one painting (a Venus and Cupid), and possibly two, based on drawings by Michelangelo, his paintings have a sweetness and lightness, indeed a grace, which is quite foreign to the terribilità characteristic of Michelangelo's paintings.

Most of Pontormo's, and all of Rosso's, formal training was with Andrea del Sarto. While still his apprentices, they each executed a fresco for the church of Santissima Annunziata. These frescoes, detached and newly cleaned and restored, are the first things you see in the exhibition. Each is, in very different ways, stunning.

Pontormo's picture is a severely classical Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, a beautifully simple composition that must have been influenced by his having seen Raphael's School of Athens while on his trip to Rome. The colour harmony has unfortunately been destroyed by over-restoration. But the majesty of the work survives. This is an extraordinarily precocious picture: Pontormo was only 19 when he began it, and he never surpassed the beauty and the grace of its figures.