This catalogue traces the career of Agnolo di Cosimo known as Bronzino, a protagonist of sixteenth-century Florentine culture. It charts his life from his apprenticeship in the workshop of Jacopo da Pontormo and sojourn in the Marche region to his career

This volume investigates the many important artistic and art historical issues associated with the paintings and writings of the Florentine Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572). These include his artistic and poetical achievements, with an emphasis on his emblematic drawings and mythological painting. Specifically, his role in the development of new formal portraiture in Mannerism paintings as well as his influence in the foundation of the Florentine Academy.Bronzino was one of the most important cultural figures in Italy during the middle of the sixteenth-century, having achieved prominence as an art critic, poet, decorator and painter. Bronzino's accomplishment in all these capacities have long been the subject of study. It is only recently, however, that scholars have began to recognize the merits and influences of his paintings. Indeed, the focus of the scholarship of the last twenty-five years makes it clear that Bronzino was one of the most prominent court painters and decorators working in Florence and the Marches in the mid-sixteenth-century. In view of the celebrated position of Bronzino as a leading artist of his day, it is time to focus with some care on the most significant artistic, intellectual, cultural, and political forces which affected the origins and development of his mature iconography programs, decorative style, and history of art. This book initially concentrates on how Bronzino's humanist milieu influenced the formal qualities and iconography of his early works, as well as his written commentaries on the arts. Then on Bronzino's the artist and his intellectual strategies in portraiture and decorative paintings, particularly attractive to his demanding patrons and proved to be critical for his sustained influence as an artist and promoter of the arts academy. Finally, it elaborates on the dynamic interdependence of image and text in Bronzino's works as they were directly related to the fruitful maturity of his mythological paintings.

Drawings by the great Italian Mannerist painter and poet Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) are extremely rare. This important and beautiful publication brings together for the first time nearly all of the sixty drawings attributed to this leading draftsman of the 16th century. Each drawing is illustrated in color, discussed in detail, and shown with many comparative photographs. Bronzino's technical virtuosity as a draftsman and his mastery of anatomy and perspective are vividly apparent in each stroke of the chalk, pen, or brush. The younger generations of Florentine artists particularly admired Bronzino for his technical virtuosity as a painter, and Giorgio Vasari praised him for his powers as a disegnatore (designer and draftsman).

The Florentine artist Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572) has long been celebrated as the consummate court painter and his sumptuous portrayals of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici and Duchess Eleonora de Toledo have become icons of Italian Renaissance art. In this volume, an international assembly of scholars advances modern perceptions of Bronzino’s art by applying fresh research paradigms not only to the well-known portraits, but also to other painted subjects, frescoes, and tapestries within the context of ancient Roman precedents, Renaissance European court culture, and postmodernist theory. The seven essays supplement two recent Bronzino exhibitions in New York and Florence (2010) by addressing Bronzino’s portraiture, creative process, and tapestry production as well as past and present attitudes towards nudity, sexuality, landscapes, and poetic satire in Bronzino’s imagery.

"Pilliod compares information from documents she has discovered with Vasari's versions of the artists' lives and shows how Vasari manipulated their biographies - for example, suppressing any mention of Pontormo's status as a court artist, including his salary from Duke Cosimo I - in order to diminish their reputations, to obliterate memory of the traditional Florentine workshops, and to enhance the importance of the Academy instead. She also discusses such subjects as the evidence for Pontormo's association with the Medici court; Pontormo's house and its place in the urban fabric of Florence; Bronzino's and Pontormo's intimate association with poets and theatrical spectacles; and Allori's painted challenge to Vasari's view of the artistic scene in sixteenth-century Florence.

Do the sacred decorations of a Florentine Renaissance chapel—saints, symbols, and scriptural stories—hold personal and political meanings? Cox-Rearick's ground-breaking book explores the message hidden in the frescoes and altar panels of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, painted in the early 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino for the Spanish-born wife of Duke Cosimo I de Medici. Bronzino, then the chief painter to the Medici court, was largely responsible for the invention in Florence of the highly self-conscious, elegant Maniera style. Cox-Rearick interweaves her account of the Medici biography with an examination of Bronzino's commission in the broader context of his oeuvre. Cox-Rearick reveals the Chapel of Eleonora as an intimately devised decorative program that transmits messages about its patrons and Medici rule. Detailed color photographs of the newly restored art splendidly document this early tour de force of a major artist whose works are still relatively unexamined.