The Drawings of Bronzino: An Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I'm Carmen Bamba, curator of drawings and prints here at the Metropolitan and one of the curators for the exhibition The Drawings of Bronzino. This event, Sunday at the Met, is presented as one of the programs accompanying The Drawings of Bronzino. The exhibition is on view upstairs in the museum galleries until April This Sunday at the Met is made possible in part by the Italian Cultural Institute of New York. In organizing this afternoon's event of lectures, the speakers and I are deeply grateful to Joseph Lowe, associate museum educator for programs here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Drawings of Bronzino, the exhibition on view at the Met, celebrates the career of nicknamed Il Bronzino and court artist to the Medici. Bronzino was a leading painter and tapestry designer of his generation in Florence and was also widely praised as a poet, teacher, and festival designer. It is the first fully monographic exhibition ever to be dedicated to this great artist. The exhibition is organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York in collaboration with the Gabinetto Disegni Stampe degli Uffizi and the Polo Museale Fiorentino in Florence. My co-curators in this project are George Goldner, Drew Hines Chairman of the Department of Drawings and Prints here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Janet Cox, Frerich Professor Emerita of the Graduate Center, City University of New York. We are deeply grateful to the city of Florence for a tremendously generous collaboration with loans and scholarship to the exhibition. Almost half of the exhibition is comprised of loans from the Gabinetto Disegni Stampe degli Uffizi, that is 28 drawings, the entire holdings of Bronzino in the Uffizi's drawings collection. The exhibition is made possible by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund. Additional support is provided by Dinah Seaver and Thomas E. Foster. The exhibition has attempted to be comprehensive and brings together the 61 drawings by Bronzino or that can be reasonably attributed to him and which are in exhibitable condition. We hope you have had an opportunity to visit the show as many are drawings of great beauty and rarity seldom seen in public display. Bronzino was born on November 17, 1503, the son of a butcher in Monticelli near Florence and died on November 23, 1572 in Florence. Most of his career was spent in the city of Florence, save for two years in the town of Pesaro in 1530-32, and his stay of a few months in Rome before April 1548. Such facts do provide a certain occasion for reflection. For Bronzino is a quintessentially Florentine 16th century artist. He was a key player in the refined intellectual circles within the Medici court and outside of it, and his work resonates with themes especially associated with the city of Florence. Ongoing scholarship continues to demonstrate in a variety of ways that the qualities defining Bronzino's essential Fiorentinità, his Florentineness, in an artistic, cultural, and political sense are thoroughly manifest in his treatment of subject matter in his production as a painter, not to mention in his poetry and mastery of language. As Elizabeth Cropper and others have explored, the portraiture of Bronzino can be seen as part of a particularly Florentine pictorial tradition, one in which a pivotal work was his master Pontormo's portrait of a halberdier, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, seen at left. Professor Cropper convincingly dated Pontormo's halberdier to circa 1529-1530, identifying it as a very probable portrait of Francesco Guardi, the young Florentine nobleman hailing from the family, and who was at the threshold of enlisting in the Florentine militia called to form by the brief republican government. As seen at right, in Pontormo's drawing from the Uffizi, which you can see in the exhibition, the techniques of life drawing learned by Bronzino in his master Pontormo's workshop were to be formative. Bronzino began his apprenticeship with Pontormo, another thoroughly Tuscan artist, in circa 1515-1518. An essential Fiorentinità, that is a Florentine quality, one may argue, is also typical of Bronzino's artistic process and approach to design and drawing. The attention to life drawing, the ritrarre dal naturale, is one of the aspects of what was up to this point a thoroughly Florentine tradition. The sculptural presence of form is another. The portrait-like drawing at left communicates the tremendous psychological presence of the model in a direct manner, and may be compared to Bronzino's painted portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi of 1527-28 at right. The young man at right can be identified precisely as he holds a book with clearly legible sonnets dedicated to him by Benedetto Varchi, Bronzino's friend, and the great literary figure from the Accademia Fiorentina, as Alessandro Cecchi first established in 1991. Bronzino's study of drapery and the nude, with infinite attention to nuances of naturalistic detail, lighting, and plasticity, are further aspects of his Fiorentinità, or essentially Florentine practice as a draftsman. One may remember that Bronzino was in a sense a transitional figure. He was trained within the long-standing traditions of a medieval and renaissance apprenticeship system, trained by Raffaellino del Garbo, and later Pontormo, who in turn had been trained by Leonardo, that is, Pontormo. But Bronzino was also a founding member, lieutenant, and consul of one of the earliest art academies, the Compagnia ed Accademia del Disegno, which was founded in 1563 when Bronzino was 60 years old. Bronzino was academic, and I use a term in quotation marks, one may argue even before the Accademia del Disegno was being founded. The Ragionamenti delle Regole del Disegno, a dialogue of the 1560s by Bronzino's beloved pupil and adoptive son, Alessandro Alori, describes Bronzino's views about Disegno, that is, design and drawing. According to this written testimony, Bronzino thought highly of pulitezza, the cleanliness of design and drawing technique on the paper, and gave a few practical hints about achieving such pulitezza or cleanliness. One of his recommendations was to use black chalk because it could be most easily erased with soft moist breadcrumbs. While the precise identity of Bronzino's portrait of a young man is not clear, he is likely to be one of the literary figures whom our artists befriended in the 1530s. As several scholars have discussed, the Met's portrait of a young man belongs with a remarkable series of portraits by Bronzino from the 1530s, and these will be discussed in the talks today, in which their Florentine identity is recognizable from the modes of black dress, from the subtle quotations of Florentine works such as Michelangelo's sculptures or Pontormo's halberdier pose, and from the use of a Brunelleschian architectural vocabulary in the setting. Despite the evident lacunae in the survival of drawings, it is evident that in the preparatory studies for the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo Fresco, Bronzino displayed an exemplary control of technique in the design process. Regarding the sequence of designs for the figure of Saint Michael, Fresco d'Ondevalt of the Chapel, drawn first, was an overall synthetic composition or modello, now in Frankfurt, of which you see a detail of this drawing at the upper right. It reveals the very abstracted features of the figure of Saint Michael, indicating that it was drawn partly or mostly from memory, rather than from direct observation of a living model. The drawing at left in the Louvre represents the following step, the naturalistic study from the living model, which came after the moment of the Frankfurt drawing. Here represented is a young man of vulnerable expression, and Bronzino's search for the contours of the raised arm are evident as the living model held up the difficult pose. In the final fresco seen at lower right, the model's face was entirely idealized and even heroicized in the classical manner. Although partly inspired on the pose of the dolino, a Roman bronze unearthed in Pesaro during Bronzino's work there in 1530-32, the study for a standing youth was clearly and closely observed from a living model. That is, antiquity was quoted but improved through the study of afternature. The enlarged detail seen at right especially reveals the searching contours and pentimenti along the torso and hips. In the case of the single surviving cartoon fragment by Bronzino, it can be demonstrated that he actually used this full-scale drawing for the fresco according to the usual Tuscan practice, because the designs of the head and facial features are in the same size and the outlines in the cartoon and the fresco surface appear incised for transfer. The silhouetting of the giornata or day's plaster patch also correspond in the drawing and fresco. As is seen in the Met's exhibition, Bronzino's drawings for tapestries reveal his great strengths as a designer of such weavings in the best tradition of Florentine disegno, in that clarity of outline, clarity of sculptural modeling, and an utmost precision of detail are everywhere evident. Given that in the museum's Bronzino exhibition the various tapestry composition drawings for the story of Joseph are displayed together, this can demonstrate very readily that Bronzino prepared the small-scale preliminary designs with an extraordinary consistency in the scale of the figures from composition to composition. The rigor of practice in drawing and the meticulous articulation of each of the steps in the design process meant that Bronzino could delegate much of the labor of execution of cartoons for the tapestries to assistants. Illustrated at left is a letter by Bronzino of April 1548, written soon on his return from Rome to Duke Cosimo de' Medici to request Raffaellino d'Alcole as an assistant in producing the story of Joseph tapestry cartoons. A detail of the letter with Bronzino's signature is seen at right. This letter has often been presumed lost, but as you can see it is in Paris. A full transcription is published in the Met's Bronzino catalog as appendix two. A detail from the Berlin modello for Pharoah receiving Jacob into Egypt in the story of Joseph tapestry series can illustrate the complete control of atmospheric tone in Bronzino's own designs for the second half of the Joseph tapestry project in 1550-53, and you will hear more about the execution of the related tapestry from dottoressa Lucia Meoni. Bronzino's meticulous approach to the craftsmanship of drawing and painting eloquently suggests his pedagogic gifts, as does the reasoning about the rules of drawing that is attributed to him in the dialogue of the 1560s recorded by Alori, In Alori's dialogue, Bronzino discoursed at length about figure drawing, and Bronzino spoke about methods of measurement, bodily proportions, and human anatomy. As is independently attested to by Vasari, Bronzino trained numerous pupils, and so the pedagogic impulse is perhaps a final aspect of the Florentine tradition to think about, and in particular regarding Bronzino's craftsmanship. So with these piccoli pensieri little thoughts about Bronzino's Florentineness, we turn to this afternoon's papers.