Art Review - 'The Drawings of Bronzino' - At the Met, Florentine Master’s Spirited Drawings - NYTimes.com
A Line Both Spirited and Firm
Agnolo Bronzino’s was the hand to hire for a power portrait in mid-16th-century Florence. He could turn toddlers into potentates and make new-money Medicis look like decent people. His painting shaped late Mannerism, the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted, like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and bells of the Counter-Reformation.
At his peak, in the 1550s, Bronzino was the most influential painter in Florence. And although his reputation went into eclipse, it never went away. By the 20th century he was back. InHenry James’s 1902 “Wings of the Dove” a Bronzino portrait of a noblewoman, “with her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds,” is the culminating symbol of evanescent magnificence around which that deeply mannered novel turns.
Why, given his fame, this artist has had to wait some 500 years for a museum solo is a puzzle. But that solo, called “The Drawings of Bronzino,” has now arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Encompassing all but two of the 61 works on paper currently attributed to him, and justifying each attribution in its spectacular catalog, the show is a scholarly tour de force. It is also, at first glance, an unexpectedly low-key take on an artist whose painting can have quite the opposite effect.
But drawing is the right place to start with Bronzino. The drawn line, disegno, was the root element of the Renaissance tradition from which he came. Its character varies from artist to artist among his Mannerist contemporaries. Parmigianino gave his line a swoony, ribbony lift; Jacopo Pontormo infused it with the encephalographic jitters.
Bronzino does something in between, less extreme. His line, or sense of movement, is vivacious but purposeful, hot but not wild. It was the energy source for his art.
Bronzino — a nickname — was born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Tori in 1503, the son of a Florentine butcher. After initial training with so-so artists, he had the luck to be taken on by Pontormo, who was only nine years his senior and on the cutting edge of new Florentine art. Temperamentally they were opposites, Pontormo a misanthrope, Bronzino a people person. Yet they developed a close bond, and collaborated on and off for decades.
Their mutual reliance may have been in part a response to the threatening era they lived in. In the early 16th century, Florence existed in a state of perturbation. It was twice ravaged by plague. Politically it was on sustained red alert. In 1492 Florentines had expelled a traitorous Medici ruler and established a republic. Over the next half-century the Medicis made repeated efforts to regain power. The city endured military siege; its economy rose and fell; the atmosphere was murderous. Many artists, including native sons like Michelangelo, left, never to return.
Bronzino stayed. As an artist and a poet he was thoroughly embedded in Florentine high culture, with its weave of European urbanity and Tuscan particularity. And although moving toward independence, he continued to work with Pontormo on large-scale paintings. In such paintings it can be difficult to sort out the contribution of one artist from another. And making such distinctions in the case of drawing can be as hard or harder.
Painting was all about finish, the smoothing over of discrepant textures, the hiding of the seams. Drawing occupied a far looser and more relaxed aesthetic category. Although drawings presented to clients as demonstration pieces were highly polished, most were disposable byproducts of routine studio activity. Young artists learned their trade by repeatedly drawing work by their seniors.
Established artists used drawings to rough out ideas, resolve problems, pass on instructions or just to relax their hand. Drawing was a medium in which one artist could be and do many things, and through which several different artists could share a signature style.
A main purpose of the Met exhibition is to sift through all these variables and isolate a body of drawings by one artist. And the method traditionally used is the blend of research, visual analysis and gut instinct known as connoisseurship. This approach is fully embraced by the show’s organizers, George R. Goldner, the chairman of the museum’s department of drawings and prints; Carmen C. Bambach, a Met curator; and the art historian Janet Cox-Rearick.
Questions of attribution are trickiest in drawings from Bronzino’s early years, when he was under his teacher’s spell. A bust-length study of a heavy-lidded youth, probably a studio assistant, from around 1527, is credited to Bronzino at the Met but appeared under Pontormo’s name at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2004. The reassignment has been made on stylistic grounds, though the image still seems to float back and forth between the artists.
Identifying subjects can also lead to debate. A marvelous black chalk portrait of a bearded man dressed in what looks like an artist’s apron was long assumed to be a portrait of Pontormo by Bronzino. At the Met the drawing is still by Bronzino but now depicts an unnamed “seated man.” Why the change? According to the catalog, one art historian feels that that likeness is too impersonal to be an homage by a protégé to a beloved mentor. Another points out that the sitter is partially bald, and Pontormo was not.
Attributions are on firmer ground beginning in the 1530s, by which point Bronzino was a free agent with commissions of his own. A tender study of the “Dead Christ” — soft as a cloud of dust — relates to an existing fresco he did of a Pietà. A red chalk drawing of a nude youth playing panpipes is clearly a study for a panel painting called “The Contest of Apollo and Marsyas.” Another nude, drawn on mustard-yellow ground, turns up in a fresco Bronzino created in the 1540s for the private chapel of the Medici duchess Eleonora of Toledo.
Eleonora was the wife of Cosimo I, Duke of Florence (1519-74). He taxed the city into the ground, and spent lavishly on art. He founded the Uffizi (the Met show is a collaboration with that museum and the Polo Museale Fiorentino), and bankrolled fantastic public spectacles (usually in his own honor). He hired Bronzino as his court artist and charged him with producing political advertising in the form of frescos and tapestries, and with supplying a line of dynastic portraits.
The model of patrician portraiture Bronzino invented was picked up by the rest of Europe. In typical examples the sitters, whether adults or children, come across as simultaneously warm and chilly, serene with self-confidence but often, to quote James, “unaccompanied by joy.” In each case the human figure seems to be molded from a compound of marble and flesh, and faces are rendered with an oddly cosmetic naturalism that anticipates Ingres.
There’s a single painting at the very end of the Met show, Bronzino’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” owned by the museum. Done in the 1530s, it is a portrait of an unknown but superbly supercilious member of Florence’s intellectual elite, someone who wears his basic republic black with flare and who would have understood the connoisseurial impulse, with its mix of fact and desire, that drives the exhibition.
Frankly, after three rooms of drawings that demand close scrutiny, the painting, with its colors, solid forms and indisputable Bronzino look, comes as a relief. You may well find yourself hungry for more of the same, and you’ll have more in Florence next fall when a first survey of Bronzino’s paintings opens at the Palazzo Strozzi.
Yet there’s an aspect of the artist — call it his un-Mannerist side — that may be fully available only at the Met.
Take a look at the late drawing called “Head of a Young Man” from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The sitter looks like someone the artist might have met on a beach, a surfer at Santa Monica. His neck and shoulders are bare; his hair wind-ruffled; his face, with its large, wide-spaced eyes looking straight at us, has the candid realism of a Fayum portrait.
Then look at a reproduction of the painting — it’s in the catalog — for which the drawing is a study. There we see the sitter at half length, his neck encircled by a lace collar; his shoulders encased in a rich black coat, his hair covered by a plumed cap. His face is more perfectly composed but looks tranquilized, inelastic, masklike; his glance is off to the side, away from us, fixed on nothing in particular. The picture is fascinating: a seductive, princely invention. But it’s more about haberdashery and attitude than about character. The face in the drawing is the one I remember, the face of someone real, someone I might actually know.
