Bronzino
‘Portrait of a Young Man’, 1530s
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929
image: www.metmuseum.org
Bronzino
‘Seated Male Nude (Study for the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence)’, 1565-69
Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2005 (2005.354)
image: www.metmuseum.org
The Drawings of Bronzino at the Metropolitan
The Drawings of Bronzino, the first exhibition ever dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), will bring together nearly all of the 61 known drawings by, or attributed to, the great Florentine court artist of the Medici. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 20 through April 18, 2010
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Source:Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Drawings of Bronzino will offer an introduction to Bronzino’s celebrated oeuvre and a unique insight into his larger projects and commissions through the close examination of his drawings. Bronzino was a perfectionist, not prolific, and his surviving drawings, while exquisitely beautiful, have been little studied, as they are seldom on public view. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will explore his work as a draftsman in depth and make a substantial scholarly contribution, re-examining some of the open questions regarding his career, and more precisely defining the chronology of his works.
The display of studies in chalk as well as more painterly drawings in wash and gouache will demonstrate Bronzino’s brilliant command of the human figure, his inventive genius as a designer, and his gift for composition. Preparatory drawings related to important fresco cycles, altarpieces, and tapestries with rich allegorical meanings will reveal the artist’s literary sensibilities. The exhibition will showcase an exceedingly rare loan from the Biblioteca Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan of a drawing for one of the earliest tapestries to come out of the Medici manufactory called Justice Liberating Innocence. This fragile work, which has been on public view only once before, evidences Bronzino’s clear manner of depicting complex compositions, in which literary sensibility is displayed with subtlety and great aesthetic interest.
The Metropolitan Museum’s refined and graceful painting, Portrait of a Young Man, will be displayed in the last gallery of the exhibition where it will be accompanied by panels detailing recent discoveries of under-drawing in the picture through infrared reflectography
Surprisingly, this great artist has never been the subject of a comprehensive exhibition, yet he is one of the most important draftsmen of the 16th century, and a leading figure among Mannerist painters in Florence. A painter, draftsman, teacher, and learned poet, Bronzino became famous as the court artist to the Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and his beautiful wife, the Duchess Eleonora di Toledo. Bronzino’s portrait of the Duchess and her son became one of the artist’s best-known masterpieces and evidence his power in capturing the psychology of his sitters. His technical virtuosity as a painter and draftsman was highly praised by his contemporaries, and he was a much sought-after teacher, who had numerous pupils. Bronzino, however, was no less admired in the intellectual circles of his day for his accomplished poetry, which demonstrates a refined intellect and pungent vernacular wit.
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