Il Bronzino
Italian painter
1503 CE to 1572 CE
Agnolo di Cosimo (November 17, 1503 – November 23, 1572), usually known as Il Bronzino, or Agnolo Bronzino (mistaken attempts also have been made in the past to assert his name was Agnolo Tori and even Angelo (Agnolo) Allori), is an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence.
The origin of his nickname, Bronzino is unknown, but could derive from his dark complexion, or from that he gives many of his portrait subjects.
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Andrea del Sarto travels briefly to France in 1518, although his crucial influences remain Raphael and the Roman High Renaissance.
Pontormo, who, after briefly studying with Leonardo, became an assistant to Andrea del Sarto, from whom he learned the High Renaissance idiom, had broken completely from the classical style by 1515, when he began his Joseph in Egypt, which he completes in 1518.
The Joseph canvases (now in the National Gallery in London) offer another example of Pontormo's developing style.
Done around the same time as the earlier Visitation, these works (such as Joseph in Egypt, at left) show a much more mannerist leaning.
According to Giorgio Vasari, the sitter for the boy seated on a step is his young apprentice, Bronzino.
Agnolo Bronzino (di Cosimo di Mariano), court painter to Duke Cosimo I de' Medici of Tuscany, had studied under Jacopo Pontormo, from whom he absorbed the traditionally Florentine artistic penchants for elegant linearism, emotional intensity, and brilliant color.
From these and from his study of Michelangelo and Raphael, Bronzino has developed his characteristic style.
In his Allegory and his decoration of the Chapel of Eleonora da Toledo, both executed in the 1540s, Bronzino paints the forms with detailed accuracy and an extreme sensitivity to textures and surfaces, yet orders his spatial relationships in an often highly unnatural manner.
In Bronzino’s religious paintings, such as Deposition of Christ, painted in 1545, the artist appears less concerned with subject than with formal allusions to the art of Pontormo and Michelangelo and even to classical art.
A distinguished portraitist, he portrays his many prominent sitters as personifications of political power, exemplified in the court portraits Cosimo I in Armor and Eleonora da Toledo with Her Son.
Bronzino had been commissioned around 1545 to create a painting that has come to be known as Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time.
Brilliantly erotic, it displays the ambivalence, eroticism and obscure imagery that is characteristic of the Mannerist period, and of Bronzino's master Pontormo.
The painting may have been commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany or by Francesco Salviati, to be presented by him as a gift to Francis I of France.
Vasari wrote that it was sent to King Francis, though he does not specify by whom.
The erotic imagery would have appealed to the tastes prevalent in both the Medici and French courts at this time.
The attention to texture and wealth is also consistent with Bronzino's aristocratic patronage.
The figure of Venus can be likened to a precious object (such as a marble statue) in a luxurious setting, desirable because of her unavailability.