Agnolo Bronzino

Artist Biography

Mannerist painter and poet Agnolo di Cosimo Bronzino was the pupil of Pontormo, who influenced him heavily early in his career. By about 1530 Bronzino had moved away from Pontormo's nervous sensibility and developed an art and career independent of his master. His new style was first evident in his portrait art, prints and posters. For Bronzino, a portrait was a mask. Rather than revealing the sitter's character, the Florentine aimed to convey his subject's social standing, elegance, and restraint. Bronzino expressed the material world in his portraits; the enameled colors and attention to depicting details like his sitters' lace collars, hair, and jewelry, and even the veins in their hands gave his portraits a remote decorativeness.

As court painter to Cosimo I de' Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, Bronzino also painted religious works, which he approached with the same cool detachment as his portraits. Between 1546 and 1548, Bronzino lived in Rome. His allegorical art, prints and posters influenced younger Mannerist painters with their distorted poses, exaggerated expressions, and emphasis on movement.

In his later art, prints and posters, Bronzino discarded his frozen passion, conceiving his public paintings as cumulative displays of his encyclopedic knowledge of art history and his talent for assimilating it into his own works, a notion that also typified Mannerism.

Agnolo Bronzino Art, Prints and Posters Collection