Van Gogh •
Artist Biographies
•
Agnolo Bronzino
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Agnolo Bronzino |
| Birth Year : |
1503 |
| Death Year : |
1572 |
| Country : |
Italy |
Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, called Il Bronzino, was born in Monticello, outside Florence. He was first a student of, and
then assistant to, Jacopo Pontormo, one of the founders of Florentine Mannerism. Pontormo, after studies with Andrea del
Sarto, was influenced by
Michelangelo,
Leonardo,
and
Durer, and passed on these influences to Il Bronzino, one
of the few artists able to get along with the melancholy, difficult old man. In 1523, when an outbreak of plague struck
Florence, Pontormo took Bronzino with him to Certosa where they worked together on a series of frescoes, now badly damaged.
During this period, Il Bronzino's own reputation was established and by 1530 he was working for the Duke of Urbino. In 1532
he returned to Florence where he painted portraits and completed a fresco of his own before again working briefly with
Pontormo at Careggi and Castello. In 1540 Duke Cosmic I, de'Medici appointed Il Bronzino his court painter and in 1545
the artist began the task (not completed until 1565) of decorating the private chapel of the Duke's wife, Eleanor of Toledo.
Il Bronzino is most famous for his portraits, delicately formal in style, coldly clear, and with an enamel-like surface. He
also painted decorative, allegorical scenes and a great many altarpieces for various Florentine churches. All of these were
equally formalistic and elegant, as strict and austere as the atmosphere created by Eleanor, who imported to the Medici
court a Spanish love of ritual ceremoniousness. More classical in feeling and character than his master Pontormo, Il
Bronzino brought to Mannerism an almost marble-like purity of form that was not be to be equaled until the nineteenth
century by Ingres. Active as an artist all his life, Il Bronzino aided Vasari and other artists in the realization of the
founding of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts in 1563. Il Bronzino died in 1572, in San Lorenzo, where, since 1569, he had
been working on a large fresco, which was completed by his pupil Alessandro Allori.
US
"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures."
