Cooked Saint, Dante Nose Job Grace Met’s Bronzino Show: Review

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Legend has it that St. Lawrence, while being cooked alive by order of Emperor Valerian in 258, shouted: “This side is done. Turn me over and take a bite.” The martyred wag became the patron saint of comedians, grill cooks and butchers.

His story came to mind as I admired the work of a son of a butcher, the Florentine artist Agnolo Bronzino (1503-72), at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The Drawings of Bronzino” gathers almost 60 pieces by this master draftsman that range from doodles and rough sketches to dazzling figures and portraits -- all serving the function of practice for a separate finished work.

A student of Jacopo da Pontormo, some of whose drawings are here for comparison (and unavoidably when pupil and teacher drew on opposite sides of the same sheet), Bronzino flourished as court artist to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici after 1540. Drawings from that period, which occupy one of the show’s three rooms, include several studies for a series of tapestries depicting the biblical story of Joseph.

Among these is the magnificent “Joseph With Jacob and His Brothers,” featuring a dozen figures finely rendered in black chalk and arranged so organically that the eye feels compelled to rove ceaselessly around the small (17-inch by 13-inch) sheet.

Emotionally Drained

Next to each drawing is a photograph of the correlating detail from the finished work, revealing in several portraits that Bronzino’s Mannerist bent often drained from the completed face emotion that was present in the draft. In another metamorphosis, a frequently copied Bronzino study of Dante’s head, with nose flattened against the sheet’s right margin, profits from the rhinoplasty of an unnamed Florentine artist, whose version is flatteringly aquiline.

The half-grilled St. Lawrence appears in a colorful, busy photograph of the Bronzino fresco in Florence’s Basilica of San Lorenzo. The martyr, surrounded by enough bare muscled torsos to stage a strongman contest, seems to have just noticed the two flying cherubs descending toward him with chalice and crown, suggesting relief is nigh.

“The Drawings of Bronzino” runs through April 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street. Information: +1-212-535-7710; http://www.metmuseum.org.

(Jeffrey Burke is an editor with Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Jeffrey Burke in New York at jburke21@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for the story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.