Portrait of a Man with a Quill and Sheet of Paper, Bronzino (1527)
Agnolo di Cosimo, called Bronzino. Portrait of a young man with a quill and a sheet of paper, possibly a self-portrait of the artist.
This captivating, rediscovered portrait is a significant addition to the corpus of one of the leading Italian artists of the Late Renaissance: Agnolo di Cosimo, known as Bronzino. Datable to about 1527, the painting is one of the earliest instances of Bronzino’s dual exploration of portraiture, a genre that would define much of his career, and poetry, an academic endeavor he simultaneously pursued. In remarkably beautiful condition and with unbroken provenance from the seventeenth century until the present, this portrait’s recent reemergence allows a greater appreciation of the artistic and poetic virtuosity already established by Bronzino in his youth. Refined, elegant, and intellectually complex, it is a masterpiece of the Florentine Cinquecento.
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