So, it's sort of a strange story, I have come across a few portraits in my international museum hopping which have caught my attention in a very specific sort of way. First a portrait of a young man against a chartreuse background in the Frick, then one of an oddly proportioned though somehow stunningly beautiful young man in the Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, and finely a portrait of a third stunningly beautiful youth, hand on hip, and modeled with an astonishing evenness of light, giving the image an almost candy-coated air in the Met. It was not until I began work on a paper concerned with queer theory and the works of Pierre et Gilles that I came across the name Bronzino and committed it to memory. Upon following up on a bit of information concerning this painter and his sexual orientation I found reproduction of all the aforementioned pieces and was, to end a rather banal narrative, shocked to realize they had all been produced by the same hand. Anyway, his work possesses some of the ethereal and yet naive, almost base-relief like rendering of Botecelli with the significantly more astute naturalistic qualities of Northern Renaissance art, in short it is divine.
