Building Conventions

When Bronzino is commissioned for a portrait, he is informed by an entire history of portrait painting, the fashion in dress of that moment, along with his own conventions as an artist. Elements of portraiture, such as certain backgrounds and poses, were commonplace in sixteenth-century Florence. Bronzino could choose from a landscape, an architectural space, or a plain colour, or perhaps a mixture of these. Depending on how much of the sitter’s body he wished to present, he could choose between half-length, three-quarter length, and full-length portraits which all had precedence. A sitter’s face could be shown in profile, three-quarter turn, or full facing poses. To further their options, they could paint the sitter either sitting or standing, looking out at the viewer or away.

Of all of these various methods, Bronzino approached his portraits in a strategic way. Rather than rotating through all of these past and current conventions, he created his own routine of depicting is sitters, and then only changed elements in order to create emphasis on a sitter’s personality trait or value. For the vast majority of his portraits, he preferred the three-quarter turn, with the sitter looking out towards the viewer. More specifically, Bronzino had strategies for the different groups of people he painted. For his portraits of men, he located them in architectural spaces or in front of drapery and placed them either standing or sitting. His portraits of women have backgrounds where a singular colour takes up most of the space and typically seated.

For the young intellectual men of Florence, Bronzino tended to use a set of colours, clothing, and objects to demonstrate their position in society and their education. These two portraits of currently unknown sitters fit within this typology. Both men are set inside private interior spaces, accompanied by blue books. Although one is standing and the other is sitting, they both have their bodies faced three-quarters towards the left, while their gaze points directly out to the viewer. The colours of black, pink, and blue, appear in the drapery, the table, and the books.

These common features and strategies made it easier for artists like Bronzino to create portraits, as they did not have to begin from scratch with each new portrait commission. Bronzino could then focus on the individual themselves, and what they brought to the sitting.