The brilliant neurotics of the late Renaissance

In many respects the average art-lover remains a Victorian, and the Florentine Renaissance is one area in which that is decidedly so. Most of us, like Ruskin, love the works of 15th-century artists of that city — Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Ghiberti — and are much less enthusiastic about those of the 16th. But a superb exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism, might change some minds.

It contains pictures that are intense in emotion, eccentric, mysterious, sometimes bizarre and — to a 21st-century eye — appealingly neurotic. Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo were almost exact contemporaries, born within a few months of each other in 1494. Their training was similar, they shared many influences, and yet as the subtitle of the show implies, they were very different artistic personalities.

The exhibition begins in the second decade of the 16th century. At that point, the great masterpieces of the High Renaissance were so new the paint was still drying.