A Masterpiece by Agnolo Bronzino

Between 2010 and 2011, I had the opportunity to examine Portrait of a young man with a book on fully three separate occasions. I saw it in New York and again while it was being cleaned in a conservation laboratory in Figline Valdarno in late 2010. I also had the good fortune to compare it with other works by Pontormo and Bronzino while I was arranging the exhibition Bronzino: Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici. This series of coincidences helped me to analyse the painting in some depth. It also led me to draw different conclusions from those of the critics who had only studied the painting in the old photograph, without having had a chance to see it.

The painting depicts a young man dressed in black secular garb, sitting at a worktable covered with a green cloth. The fingers of his left hand are leafing through the pages of a handwritten book while he holds a quill in his right hand, his pose appearing to suggest that he has just finished writing. The pages of the book are written in ink as though it were a notebook of some kind, but they are quite unusual: some sentences seem to be crossed out while others appear to have been rewritten, and there are words written crossways on the page as though to suggest a gloss added as an afterthought. In portraits with books, the painter usually depicts printed books or headed writing paper but in this case, since we cannot read the individual words, the book probably hints at his profession: a man of letters or a civil servant versed in the use of coded writing.

The short, reddish beard of his young face suggests that he is probably aged between 20 and 30, and even if it is not possible to establish his true identity, we may assume that he is a Florentine intellectual of the same period as the painter who portrayed him, a conjecture suggested both by the friendly tone of his pose and gaze, and by the rapid brushwork.

The paintwork, still in perfect condition, was originally applied in a very thin layer with a firm and rapid hand. The only visible sign of deterioration is the vertical crack that caused the panel to divide into two pieces. The crack has been successfully restored by simply repairing the wood and making good the painted surface. The sitter's eyes are truly alive and the painting is both of exceptionally high quality and, at the same time, surprisingly severe in its reduced palette. The artist's choices are very clearly in evidence and the style is of such a high standard that the painting cannot be attributed to a mere follower of Pontormo. In fact, it is possible to identify its author with greater certainty.

The first obvious stylistic reference is to Pontormo, as we can see in the structure of the portrait, in the influence of the northern European school and in the ovoid silhouette of the face with the wide-open, sparkling, rounded eyes that are another of the characteristic features of Pontormo's style. One has but to compare it with the faces in the fresco in Poggio a Caiano or with the tondi painted for the Capponi Chapel in Santa Felicita. The depiction of the soft, tapering hands with their small, oval nails also echoes Pontormo's style, as does the manner in which the black tunic is rendered, the differences in the grain of the fabric being portrayed with small black-on-black brushstrokes with tiny variations of shade reminiscent of the coat worn by Alessandro de' Medici in Pontormo's portrait of him in the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. The elegantly tapering hands recur in such works as the Visitation in Carmignano, or again in the Philadelphia Portrait of Alessandro de' Medici, where we can also detect a similar tendency to cause the figure to emerge from an almost monochrome black background, an expedient invented by Leonardo to which Pontormo resorted in many of his works, the most representative of which is the double portrait now in the Fondazione Cini in Venice.

Yet in this Portrait of a Young Man with a Book there are other elements which are unknown in Pontormo's work and which point us in the direction of his most famous pupil, Agnolo Bronzino, whose style, Giorgio Vasari tells us, was not easy to distinguish from that of Jacopo Pontormo in the years when master and pupil were working together on the Evangelist tondi for the Capponi Chapel in Santa Felicità. Vasari was writing about the years between 1525 and 1528, before Bronzino's departure for Pesaro in 1530. Sure enough, while it is difficult to tell the two artists' styles apart in the Capponi Evangelists, Bronzino's painting tended thereafter to become increasingly polished and compact, the artist focusing increasingly on rendering the tactile evidence of nature as revealed to the senses.

The Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, a young poet who was a friend and pupil of Benedetto Varchi, is generally dated to shortly before Bronzino's journey to Pesaro, although it has been attributed to Pontormo in the past, and even Gamba himself, believing it to be by Pontormo, compared it to the portrait under discussion here in 1956. In his Portrait of Lorenzo Lenzi, Bronzino embarks on a style of painting capable of rendering the tactile nature of the tunic's fabric and a clarity in the modelling of the face, the most direct precedent for which is to be found in this Portrait of a Young Man with a Book.

In this panel too, the face is defined, albeit more rapidly, with a style of painting that imparts solid and luminous volume to it — a feature that most readily distinguishes Bronzino's painting from that of Pontormo. Also the tapering and supple hands with their soft, wavering, cylindrical fingers, while based on Pontormo's style, are almost identical with the hands of the sitter in the Portrait of Guidobaldo della Rovere in the Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti in Florence, which Bronzino painted at the end of his stay in Pesaro in 1532.

Yet the comparison with two earlier works by Bronzino is necessary to approach the dating of this portrait. Specific similarities both in the rapid yet soft brushwork and in the way the faces are drawn are also to be found in the Holy Family with St. Elisabeth and the Infant St. John the Baptist of circa 1526–1528 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In particular, the Infant St. John's face is painted with the same confidence as we see in this portrait, with the same determination to impart fleshy brilliance to the surface of the eyelids and to the sitter's lineaments. Also identical are the vibrant, liquid brushstrokes defining the pages of the book – as soft as wax – in this portrait and St. Elisabeth's lined skin in the Washington Holy Family.

Further comparisons may be made with the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the Uffizi, which Bronzino painted around 1529, where the Magdalene's oval face has the same polished surface over which the light flows with intense clarity, defining the purity and fullness of her cheeks and eyes.

In conclusion, all of the above features come together to suggest the attribution of this outstanding portrait, which has finally come to light again after decades of oblivion, to take up its rightful place at the heart of the study of Florentine 16th-century painting, to the hand of Agnolo Bronzino, who must have painted it in strict adherence to Pontormo's style between 1525 and 1527.

Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of a young man with a book is offered for sale as part of Old Masters Week in New York, 24-29 January. For more information on our sales, click here.