Happy birthday Mr. Bronzino

Angelo Bronzino was born exactly 510 years ago (Agnolo di Cosimo, November 17, 1503 – November 23, 1572, usually known as Il Bronzino, or Agnolo Bronzino). Today, his birthday is an opportunity, for us, to demonstrate how the contemporary art perspective could actually shed new light on the works of artists of the past.

 

Angelo Bronzino has always been considered an important artist. Giorgio Vasari and Benedetto Varchi (XVI century) have written about him in a very positive way. However, his sensuality soon became a problem. Already in the sixteenth century many critics condemned the eroticism of some of his characters depicted in sacred works because they “threatened to ignite the desire”. It was for this reason that at some point in its production, Bronzino stopped painting naked breasts. But his sensuality was not objectionable with a garment: it was inherent in the characters. This latter aspect polluted the judgment even in the nineteenth century. Stendhal gave ambiguous judgments. John Ruskin in “Modern Painting” wrote: “vile as it is in colour, vacant in invention, void in light and shade, a heap of cumbrous nothingness, and sickening offensivenesses…”.. Frank Jewett Mther in his “History of Italian painting” 1923, described him as “one of the first professionally unmoral artists”. Even Bernard Berenson had negative words. And so on.

 

At a certain point, however, those who had long been considered flaws begin to be seen as attractive elements. Sensuality, restlessness, viciousness, darkness of mind, icy beauty, inappropriateness, indifference, depravity, cruelty. It was the time when the look of the art of the nineteenth century was coming into play. “There was in that beautiful countenance more than beauty, for what most fascinated the observer was a supreme and disdainful indifference to the passion of others. It was a vicious face, except the beauty could never be quite vicious; it was a cruel face, except that indolence could never be quite cruel. It was a face that haunted you, and yet your admiration was alloyed with an unreasoning terror” . So wrote William Somerset Maugham in his novel “The Micigan” in 1909 about the “Portrait of young man with statue” (1550-55) in the Louvre. The same portrait inspired Marcel Proust to dedicate a passage within the “Prisonnière.”

 

The art historian Elizabeth Cropper, a great connoisseur of the work of Bronzino, noted that, at the beginning of the XXI century, the rediscovery of the general importance of Bronzino is inspired by developments in contemporary art, the interest for expressionism and anxiety rather than the discourse on classicism. With the development of metaphysical art, many critics rediscover the artist’s characters, “intellectual, abstract and Platonic”. At the end of the 20s, in the search for solidity of forms that was bringing artists to look again at Cézanne, Bronzino was considered a model. Its classic forms have been declared a landmark by artists such as Frida Kalho.

 

The case of Bronzino is the evidence, in short, that the point of view of contemporary artists is often able to open new avenues of interpretation for the old masters. They break the banks of the specialized critics, and provide the general public with new ways of reading, which are then adopted even by specialists.

July 15, 2015