Bronzino Il

(actually, di Cosimo di Mariano), or Angelo (Agnolo) Bronzino. Born Nov. 17, 1503, in Monticelli, Tuscany; died Nov. 23, 1572, in Florence. Representative of Florentine mannerism.

Bronzino studied with Pontormo and was influenced by Michelangelo. In 1540 he became court painter for Cosimo I de’ Medici. He created a stately aristocratic portrait style in which the distance and reticence of the image corresponds to the solemn stiffness of the composition. His style is characterized by sharp outlines, cold colors, and a passionless accuracy of detail (Portrait of a Youth, c. 1535-37, at the Metropolitan Museum of New York; portraits of Cosimo I, 1545, and of Eleonora of Toledo with her son, c. 1545, both in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; and a portrait of Eleonora of Toledo [?], c. 1550, Sabauda Gallery, Turin). Bronzino’s paintings on religious and mythological themes with their complex compositions and artificial poses and gestures are sometimes marked by eroticism (Allegory, or Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time, c. 1542-45, in the National Gallery, London). He painted frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (after 1548).