Bronzino drawings at the Met in New York

Angelo di Cosimo di Mariano (1503-1572), known to history as Agnolo Bronzino, was the great Florentine court painter of the 16th Century, which is no small compliment. Bronzino is most famous for his Allegory of Venus and Cupid, one of the most striking and erotically charged depictions of the female form in history. It's all the more fascinating a work for the luster of its central figure, whose flesh has a luster unequaled save in Chinese glazes.

Bronzino specialized in that kind of alabastrine perfection, rooted in the Neo-Platonic court culture of the Medici and its idealization of the body as the temple of the spirit. His own mature style can be described as an integration of Mannerism with the older Michelangelan tradition. With the right sitter or subject, it produced some of the most fascinating works of Renaissance art.

There are 60 known Bronzino drawings extant, mostly studies for paintings, but with a few presentation pieces too. They've been assembled for the first time in America at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, together with a single painting— the Portrait of a Young Man— and it's a signal event. Nothing here is uninteresting, whether for the scholar, the connoisseur, or the casual viewer, and several of the drawings rank with the greatest of any age.

Teacher and student

For an extra treat, the exhibition includes several works by Bronzino's teacher, Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1557), one of the founding figures of Mannerism and a man only a bit older than Bronzino himself. Bronzino was soon his master's equal, and it's often difficult to distinguish teacher from pupil in some works from the 1520s that can be plausibly attributed to either, or perhaps both.

There's no doubt about Pontormo's Study for a Madonna and Child with St. John, whose furious, dynamic scribble could only be his. But scholars now argue about the Study for a Portrait of a Seated Man, one of the iconic images of the 16th Century. As a layman, I'll go with Pontormo.

But the provenance of Bronzino's early Head of Dante (1532), a reworking of a classic image of the poet that conveys not only his compelling force and intellectuality but also deep refinement and sensitivity, is uncontested. Bronzino did his own take on the theme of the Madonna and child with John about 1540, producing a small, perfectly proportioned work of the most exquisite refinement.

Mona Lisa's equal

It's tempting to comment on the show almost work by work, but it's a review you're wanting and not a primer, so I'll be wary of ink and time. The Head of a Smiling Woman (1542-43), a study in black chalk alone, is a work fully as fascinating and enigmatic as the Mona Lisa, and of even more classical beauty. The jaw just drops at it.

No less expressive of the body is the Standing Nude Seen from the Rear, a male figure, probably drawn a year or so earlier and also in Bronzino's favored chalk medium, whose suppleness and balance is a comment on the glory of the erect human form.

A late addition to the show is the glass-encased Allegorical Scene of Justice Liberating Innocence, from the Biblioteca Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, a superb example of Bronzino's handling of allegorical themes and a compendium of the draughtsman's art— a black chalk base on blue paper, overlaid with pen and ink, brown washes and accents of gouache. Justice's drawn sword is simply a flash of gouache between the thinnest of lines, a masterstroke that defines the whole crowded scene.

Individual freedom

Perhaps most impressive of all, however, is the Modello for The Resurrection (1548-52), whose depiction of the serenely but commandingly risen Christ in a scene of intense dynamic complexity is one of the summits of late Renaissance art.

Some of Bronzino's most fascinating studies are the individual portraits of secondary figures for such works as the Allegory of Venus and Cupid (Jealousy) and The Contest Between Apollo and Marsyas (Midas). In such works, he seems to set aside larger issues of allegory to create isolated character pieces that resonate beyond the compositions they're intended for, and, free of them, take on a life of their own.

This capacity for freedom— for independent life beyond the formal, hieratic place that such figures are assigned in a larger drama— is one of the most compelling aspects of Renaissance art. Burckhardt wasn't wrong to point to the valorization of the individual in that art, but it existed in tension with a still-prescriptive society in which allegory validated an authority that assigned every figure— indeed every gesture, emotion and impulse— an ordered position. To draw was to withdraw, at least temporarily, from the strictures of convention and commission, and thereby to realize at the most primary level the artist's own freedom.

Bid for immortality

Bronzino was still a superb draughtsman well into his 60s, as the studies for his The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence show. And in the year of his death he became console of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, which had at last recognized drawing as an independent art. Bronzino was also an accomplished musician and poet; his funeral oration, partly in verse, prophesied that the sweetest of rewards, immortal fame, would certainly be his:

He does not die who like Bronzino lived,
Whose soul in heaven lives, whose bones remain, whose name
Throughout the earth is famed
Wherever he did sing, or paint, or write.

Illustration in point: this magnificent show.