Grey Matters

The present portrait also compares with Bronzino’s Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi dated ca. 1528 to 1532  (Castello Sforzesco, Milan) in a number of respects (fig. 3).[2] Like the Man in the Red Cap the backdrop to the figure is vacant, but always a perfectly calibrated color. The sitters all face the spectator, are positioned slightly obliquely to the picture plane, and are sharply lit from the upper left. The effect of this spotlight is to insistently focus on the sitter, endowing him with a preternatural importance.  The Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, the Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi and the present portrait all depict men holding letters or books, a motif that had been well-established in Florentine portraiture and adapted from Northern painting of the fifteenth century. However, it is the Young Man in the Red Cap and the portrait here presented that must be analyzed together. In them the sitter displays works written in everyday Italian script while Lorenzo Lenzi displays a book written in the chancery hand (cancellaresca) that became wide-spread in the sixteenth century. In the portrait of Lenzi a sonnet dedicated to Lenzi by the humanist Benedetto Varchi is written in this script, signaling the intellectualizing poetic background of both the writer of the sonnet and its recipient. Bronzino’s beautiful handwriting is also known from other paintings and his letters.[3] Elizabeth Cropper has argued that the Lenzi portrait is more sophisticated than the group of portraits completed around 1528-29 and the inclusion of the brilliantly staged book points to the social and intellectual world of the literary academies, the Accademia degli Umidi and the subsequent Accademia Fiorentina, to which Bronzino aspired.[4] Her pointlitis well taken in and that inclusion of this type of detail is more a mark of Bronzino’s work in the 1540s than of the late 1520s. Thus the present portrait, which in stylistic comparisons alone, appears very close to Pontormo’s works of around 1528, is indeed early also because the inclusion of texts relies on an earlier tradition.

That tradition is best embodied by Francesco Cristofano called Franciabigio (Florence 1484-1525). Part of the previous generation of artists that included Andrea del Sarto, Fanciabigio provides instructive comparisons in his portraits of A Steward of the Medici-Jacopo Cennini (Hampton Court, no. 1168) and a Portrait of a Knight of Rhodes (fig. 4) dated 1514 (National Gallery, London, NG 1035).[5] Although both portraits differ from Bronzino’s image in including backgrounds, they are similar in that the sitters directly look out at the viewer and the paper or books displayed by the sitter are written in normal everyday script and are, apparently deliberately, illegible in part. It is not clear why this is the case in the portrait of the Medici employee, although it could be argued that the contents of his book were confidential, and therefore an indication of writing rather than the actual transcription of the content of that writing was intentional.[6] In the other case, that of the Knight of Rhodes who looks up from reading a letter, only the date “1514” is legible. An inscription on the edge of the table on which he rests his hands makes it clear that the content of his letter must relate to love, and therefore again likely be best kept illegible, to maintain his privacy.