A painter and draftsman, Jacopo Pontormo was born Jacopo Carucci and was the leading artist in mid-16th-century Florence and one of the most original and extraordinary of the Mannerists. Pontormo enjoyed the patronage of the de’ Medici family throughout his career but, unlike Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari, he did not become a court painter. Indeed, his subjective style of portraiture did not lend itself well to state portraits. He produced few mythological works and after 1540 devoted himself almost exclusively to religious subjects. His drawings, mainly figure studies in red and black chalk, are among the highest expressions of the great Florentine tradition of draftsmanship. His highly personal style was greatly influenced by Michelangelo, though he also drew from northern art, primarily the prints of Albrecht Dürer.

In 1508 Pontormo probably studied with Leonardo da Vinci, then with Piero di Cosimo, and in 1510 with Mariotto Albertinelli. Around 1512 he was an assistant to Andrea del Sarto. In his first independent paintings, all frescoes (now detached), he followed the High-Renaissance classical style of Fra Bartolommeo and del Sarto. Around 1517 Pontormo broke with the classicism of his teachers and his own early paintings and started creating radically experimental works in the Mannerist style. This shift is most apparent in such major early works as the Visdomini altarpiece, executed in 1518, depicting the Virgin and Child with saints. During the 1520s further series of experimental works established his mature style. In the early 1530s Pontormo executed two paintings from cartoons by Michelangelo. He painted fresco decorations (destroyed) in loggias of the de’ Medici villas at Careggi (1535–36) and Castello (1537–43), for which preparatory drawings survive.

The spirituality of Pontormo’s late portraits, such as the somber Alessandro de’ Medici (1534) and Giovanni della Casa (1540–44), coincide with the rarefied atmosphere of his late religious works. His portraits differ from those of his contemporaries in their subtle and complex psychological communication.