The Art of Agnolo Bronzino TV - National Gallery online - Ross Finocchio -
Florence: a landmark exhibition is in preparation. Restoring Genius: The Art of Agnolo Bronzino, Sky Arts 2012
Many of Bronzino’s paintings have been overlooked, lost and neglected. ibid.
82 works are arriving from galleries and museums all over the world. ibid.
Bronzino died in 1572. ibid.
Agnolo di Cosimo (called Bronzino) was the leading painter of mid-16th-century Florence. According to Vasari he is the boy on the steps in his teacher Pontormo’s Joseph with Jacob in Egypt, also in the National Gallery. Influenced, like many other artists of his generation, by Michelangelo, Bronzino is classed as a Mannerist. The refined and stylish artificiality associated with this label can be best appreciated in his Allegory.
Bronzino is chiefly famous for his portraits, especially those of Cosimo de’ Medici, first Duke of Florence (1537), his wife Eleonora da Toledo (both in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence), their children and members of their court. Bronzino’s frescoes and other religious paintings are as stylish and carefully designed as his portraits. See for instance his Madonna and Child in the Collection. National Gallery online
By the mid-sixteenth century, the influence of Mannerism had spread far beyond Florence. Two important representatives of the movement in northern Italy were Parmigianino (1503–1540) – active in Parma, Bologna and Rome – and the Venetian artist Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–1594). The highly individual styles of these two painters incorporate the elongated figure proportions, twisted poses, and compression of space that distinguish central Italian Mannerism. Ross Finocchio, Department of European Painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art