Exhibit of the week: The Drawings of Bronzino

Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York

Through April 18

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“The Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years,” said Jerry Saltz in New York. In other words, Raphael, Michelangelo, and da Vinci all arrived and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Pity, then, the unfortunate painters who came of age in their wake and were forced to follow such an act. “You can’t compete with perfection,” so many drifted toward mannerism, an intentionally artificial style whose contorted compositions can be both physically striking and psychologically complex. Among the first to point the way was “the fiendishly talented Florentine mannerist Agnolo Bronzino.” In the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of his extant drawings—nearly every single one of them—“the golden age of Renaissance miracles and harmony dissolves before our eyes” into something new and altogether stranger.

There’s a good reason more Americans aren’t familiar with Bronzino, said John Zeaman in the Bergen County, N.J., Rec­ord. Only a handful of the artist’s paintings are in U.S. museums (the Met has one), and this is the first comprehensive exhibition of his drawings “ever, anywhere.” But Bronzino’s unfortunate neglect also “has something to do with the oddities of mannerism.” When most people think of the old masters, they think of the clean, classical Renaissance look. Bronzino’s drawings, by contrast, sometimes stretch the human figure like taffy. He twists figures’ torsos, as in the male nude in his study for The Crossing of the Red Sea, with its “exaggerated cock of the hips and arch of the back.” He introduces elements of androgyny—“fem­inized male physiques and masculine-looking female ones.” When you know this artificiality is part of a larger aesthetic movement, it all makes sense. “Viewed out of historical context, it can just look perverse.”

Such shameless striving for sensation has made mannerism “the most commonly despised period in Western art history,” said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. It’s also, interestingly, the abiding sin of “creative culture today.” Artists working in the 21st century are dogged by the imposing legacy of the great modernist movements of the 20th, just as Bronzino and his contemporaries were overshadowed by the Renaissance. For the most part, our artists have responded in the same way: “Art for art’s sake, style for style’s sake.” Perhaps it’s good that we’ve had to wait until now for a show dedicated to this “ingeniously elegant” artist. Finally, we can appreciate the struggle to forge a brand-new style—finally, “we are ready for Bronzino.”