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Carmen Bambach: I’m Carmen Bambach, Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Drawings of Bronzino," the first exhibition ever dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino (born in 1503 and died in 1572), brings together nearly all of the sixty-one known drawings by the great Florentine court artist of the Medici. The exhibition features drawings of extraordinary beauty and rarity, which are seldom on public view, and draws loans from major museums and private collections within Europe and North America, including the Galleria degli Uffizi, Musée du Louvre, British Museum, Royal Library of Windsor Castle, Ashmolean Museum, Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden, and Staatliche Museen Berlin.

Bronzino was the son of a butcher. He was born in 1503 in Monticelli, near Florence. He died in 1572. He is really one of the most extraordinary artists of the sixteenth century. He spent most of his career in Florence, and he’s especially well known for his portraits of the Medici family. 

Bronzino is one of the main representatives of Mannerism in Italy, and especially in Florence. Being a poet, his literary sensibilities often profoundly inform his paintings, his compositions, full of allegorical meaning. Bronzino was an artist who prized the craftsmanship of drawing, the craftsmanship of painting. 

The high point of Bronzino’s career as a court artist to the Medici unfolds in the 1540s and 1550s, doing the Chapel of Eleonora