Bronzino (1503-1572) was the court painter of Medici Florence. Born Agnolo di Cosimo, a butcher's son, he trained under Pontormo and served Duke Cosimo I until his death, painting the ducal family in portraits so cool and flawless that they look carved. He is remembered for the Eleonora in the Uffizi and for the strangest allegory in the National Gallery in London. He was also a poet, and a comic one.
The portraits made his name a byword for ice. The man who painted them published burlesque verse, and in 1548 he was expelled from a Florentine academy for irreverent behavior.
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Look at Eleonora of Toledo and nothing moves. The duchess sits in a gown of gold pomegranates on black velvet, her son's small hand in hers, and her face gives nothing away. For centuries that stillness was read as the painter's own temper, a cold hand for a cold court.
His life says otherwise. In 1538 he published a comic poem in praise of the paintbrush, Del Pennello, and he went on writing burlesque verse for the rest of his life. In the diary of his old teacher Pontormo, his name turns up at the dinner table again and again.
That is the puzzle of Bronzino. The most controlled painter in Florence wrote jokes in verse, was thrown out of an academy for his manners, and let almost none of it show in the faces he painted for the court.
What You'll Discover
The teacher whose diary names him.
What the duchess's dress really was.
The royal gift nobody recorded arriving.
Why he painted one dwarf twice.
Who wrote the poems under the ice.