Abstract
Agnolo Bronzino's and the Statue (c. 1529-30), the cover for Jacopo Pontormo's portrait of Francesco Guardi, reveals an ambitious young painter engaging Latin and vernacular poetry. Ultimately, however, Bronzino evolved an incisive pictorial meditation on the implications of the Pygmalion myth for the assumptions of an art that aspired at once to idealization and to animation. Bronzino probed the unstable relation of the ideal nude to flesh and to nature by interpolating references to ancient sculpture, Michelangelo, and Pontormo with a citation from transalpine landscape imported unexpectedly from Martin Schongauer, and with evocations of the life drawings of lanky adolescent boys from which many of the nudes in ambitious Florentine art originated. This youthful experiment permanently conditioned Bronzino's approach; a period critic of his later in Limbo, sensing that work's contamination of the ideal with the real, would remark incisively 'He truly meant to show Christ [and] the saints ... but the mistook a brothel for Paradise'.
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