Reflections on Select Portraits of Bronzino
Eleonora da Toledo and Her Son, Francesco de’ Medici
Ludovico Capponi
Cosimo I in Armor
Laura Battiferri
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
www.socialhistoryofart.com
(This essay was written in 2008-2009.)
Bronzino, Eleonora da Toledo with Her Son, Francesco de’ Medici, 1545
Eleonora was the wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. In Bronzino's portrait, she fulfilled two of the primary roles of the Renaissance courtly lady in producing male successors to the family dynasty and in serving as a beautiful object ornamenting the Medici court. Indeed the leading lady was expected to set the aesthetic and moral standard for all other women at court. Note how the minutely recorded, "Flemish" details of very expensive costume become her courtly persona here. Rather than disrupting these expensive, exquisite surfaces with human emotion and imperfection, the visible parts of her body are just as beautiful and impassive from the well-displayed lily-white hands to the serene, marble-like face where all imperfection and passion has been polished out. Indeed, the acutely observed details created the illusion that the face was also truly rendered rather than idealized. If Bronzino's portraits were masklike and reserved beyond anything seen in Raphael, these qualities also appeared more generally in sixteenth-century court portraiture where costume and social status replaced individual personality. Even Holbein, for all his strong, individual portrait presences, formulated a mask-like, costume-piece when he painted the English king, Henry VIII.
The white hand is presented to the viewer to be admired, kissed, even worshipped, as in sixteenth-century court poetry which made the slender, delicate, lily-white female hand into a Mannerist literary topos. Numerous poems rhapsodized the beloved's hand with a display of poetic artifice no less great than that seen in Bronzino’s Eleonora da Toledo, his Laura Battiferi or Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck.
"While that slender and white hand, beautiful, neat, gentle, sweet, pleasing, worthy of glorious and illustrious fame, despoils itself of its glove and then slowly makes its way through angelic and serenely golden tresses, I feel myself divested of life and soul".
"Pen, you struggle in vain in wishing to compare the hand of my lady to a mortal thing, be it lilies, ivory, or white rose; for when Love proposes to content the human eye, he can show no more worthy object, O pretty hand, O divine hand".
"Behold the beautiful hand, white and plump, that takes all, holds all, and knows how to snare all in the beautiful nets she spreads: for who would want to extricate his bewitched soul from such a charming net?" [i]
On a more self-reflexive level, the portrait's landscape background displayed Bronzino's artistic self-consciousness by referring to the Mona Lisa and offering sophisticated viewers a chance to appreciate their own ability to recognize discreet references to other works. For our purposes, the reference is particularly revealing in the way it highlights the Mannerist artist's indifference to the distant natural world and, more importantly, to the artistic world of naturalism.
Bronzino, Ludovico Capponi, 1550-5
Ludovico Capponi was a Florentine nobleman from an old and distinguished family. (Pontormo painted his famous Descent from the Cross for the Capponi Chapel.) He appears set against a richly colored fabric typical of Mannerist court portraiture in contrast to the simpler, neutral backgrounds used earlier in Raphael. Such fabrics were at once traditional cloths of honor used to present persons of the highest importance and signs of the higher artifice prized by Mannerist artists. Dressed in the utmost finery and presented with the elegant, elongated proportions of Mannerist anatomy, he holds a cameo portrait of his beloved with a gracefully curving hand whose tapering fingers gleam milky white against his dark tunic. Here is the Mannerist theme of the beautiful hand set forth to be admired as an object of divine grace, a theme found in other Bronzino portraits, especially of women. The slender figures and smooth, unblemished skin convey the world of courtly leisure devoted to higher things, here art and love, both far from any disfiguring manual labor. The hiding of the cameo portrait heightened the private nature of amorous feeling while raising the dramatic possibility of a secret or illicit love, a commonplace in courtly romance from the start (Chretien de Troyes).
The white cod piece, protruding prominently from the dark tunic, was a fashionable accessory in Italian court portraits in the middle of the sixteenth century which also spread across the rest of Europe before dying out by the ends of the century. Too suggestive for the more decorous fifteenth century, the codpiece became fashionable at the highest levels of society only at a time when sixteenth-century humanism made all sorts of explicit sexual themes permissible, especially themes of male sexual power such as mythological rape. As a conspicuous image of male prowess offering the facsimile of a permanent erection, artists usually placed the cod piece near the masculine sword in court portraiture, as in Bronzino’s portraits of Duke Guidobaldo delle Rovere and Stefano Colonna. Ludovico Capponi wears his codpiece more as a fashionable courtly lover, without the military theme of the ruler or warrior-general seen in Bronzino’s other portraits. It is unclear why the codpiece disappeared by the later sixteenth century. From the start, it invited ridicule as an ludicrous example of male overcompensation. Sixteenth-century satirists like Rabelais quickly pounced on the codpiece as an example of aristocratic pretense in a speech parodying humanist orations on the perfections of nature and the body and reversing the focus on higher things. In Rabelais’ speech, the codpiece was grounded in nature’s law and was the first piece of courtly armor invented by Moses to secure man’s divinely ordained power.
"Would you maintain," asked Pantagruel, "that the codpiece is the principal piece of military harness? That is a very new and paradoxical doctrine. For we say that a man's arming begins with his spurs."
"I maintain it," replied Panurge, "and not wrongfully do I maintain it. Consider Nature. She wishes the plants, trees, shrubs, herbs, and zoophytes, which she has created, to be perpetuated and to last into all successive ages, without the species ever dying out, although [308] the individuals perish. She has cunningly armed their germs and seeds, therefore, in which lies this same perpetuity. She has provided and covered them, with admirable ingenuity, with husks, sheaths, caps, kernels, small cups, shells, ears, down, bark, and prickly hulls, which are to them like fine, strong natural codpieces. This is clearly exemplified in peas, beans, haricots, walnuts, white apricots, cotton-plants, sorb-apples, corn, poppies, lemons, chestnuts, and all plants generally in which, quite obviously, the germ and seed is better covered, protected, an armoured than any other part. Now Nature did not provide in this way for the survival of the human race. She created man naked, tender, and fragile, without arms offensive or defensive, in a state of innocence, the first Golden Age. She created man as an animate being, not a plant; as an animate being, I say, born for the miraculous enjoyment of all fruits and vegetable plants, an animate being born for pacific domination over all the beasts.
"When evil began to multiple among men, with the coming of the Iron Age and the Reign of Jupiter, the earth began to produce among the vegetables, nettles, thistles, thorns, and other such kinds of rebels again man. Furthermore, by decree of fate, nearly all the animals broke free from him, and tacitly conspired together to serve him no longer, to obey him no longer, in so far as they could resist him, but to harm him to the extent of their faculties and power.
"Man, therefore, wishing to maintain his original enjoyment and continue in his former dominion, not being able, moreover, conveniently to do without the services of several animals, was compelled for the first time to arm himself."
"By the holy goose of Guenet," exclaimed Pantagruel, "you've become a great slipperslopper - I should say philosopher - since the last rains."
"Consider," Panurge went on, "how Nature inspired him to arm himself, and what part of the body he first began to armour. It was, as God's my life, his ballocks,
And when Master Priapus was done
He did not ask for the same again.
"Such is the testimony of that Hebrew captain and philosopher, Moses, who affirms that man armed himself with a brave and gallant codpiece, made after a mighty fine invention from the leaves of a fig-tree, which are simple and altogether suitable in toughness, delicacy of shape, curliness, smoothness, size, color, smell, virtues, and faculties for covering and arming the ballocks. ... " [ii]
With Rabelais in mind, we can see how the codpiece satirized itself by calling visual attention to the very thing it tried to mask, the normal state of the penis: small, weak, flaccid, and “defeated”. The disappearance of the codpiece also owed something to the Counter-Reformation (1540-) crack-down on excessive nudity in religious art and the rise of a more sober, moral tone where libertine accessories were no longer fashionable.
Bronzino, Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor, 1545
Bronzino’s portrait of Cosimo rewrites Medicean family history by erasing their past as a family of Florentine bankers which first rose to prominence only in the fourteenth century before buying their way into the papacy and the French royal family in the early sixteenth century. Widely despised in republican Florence by the late fifteenth century, the Medici were expelled in 1494, only to return at the head of a papal army in 1513 and overthrow the republic. Married into the aristocracy and elevated to dukes by 1518, the Medici were expelled again in 1519 following the death of Leo X. Medicean power revived again in 1521 with the election of a second Medici pope, Clement VII, flagged again with the Sack of Rome and the overthrow of the Medici regime, before papal forces besieged the city, erected a new fortress and established a more permanent government which lasted for two and a half centuries.
Under the rule of Cosimo, the Medici consolidated power much more completely and extended it out into the countryside, gradually conquering all of the hilltop towns of Tuscany and creating a new Grand Duchy. Bronzino’s triumphalist portrait both sums up and erases all of this violent history by banishing the many defeats and exiles suffered by the Medici family. At the same time, it replaces the family’s vulgar origins in the ignoble world of money-lending with a shining courtly rhetoric of armor. The portrait also reconfigures the personal history of Cosimo from an obscure cousin living outside Florence to the family’s supreme patriarch who now rules as Grand Duke of Tuscany. For Cosimo to appear in armor was to announce the Medici family’s new status as aristocrats, as members of a warrior class – literally a knight in shining armor - and to underscore Cosimo’s conquest of Tuscany. The theme of conquest implicit in Cosimo’s portrait has close parallels with his many military and triumphal commissions in these years including Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus, Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines in the Piazza della Signoria and similar scenes in the new Medici Palace, the Palazzo Vecchio.
Ornament, Gender, and the Soft Body under Hard Armor
Cosimo wears full battle armor, not the ceremonial armor sometimes worn by Renaissance kings and emperors which was elaborately decorated with classical imagery. Nonetheless his battle armor is not without symbolic touches as seen in the area of the collar which sports the Medicean laurel first adopted as a family emblem by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the 1470s.
On the one hand, Bronzino stressed the masculine rhetoric of Cosimo’s hard armor. This is particularly striking in the spiked breastplate with its circular ornament and sharp, nipple-like spikes. Here masculine armor evokes the female breast only to transforms “feminine” mercy, love, and nurturing into something hard and military. Breast and nipple become small daggers engineered to penetrate and wound. At the same time, there is something strikingly erotic about these little spears which suggest both erected nipples aroused for “battle” and small, twin erections eager for action. Despite the phallic hardness of the armor, Bronzino also managed to infuse a certain “feminine” sensuality into Cosimo’s masculine armor which is underscored by the armor’s passionate red accents and evident in the vulnerable right hand which emerges dramatically from the darker sheath of metal like a piece of naked flesh sticking out, its soft exterior unexpectedly revealed.
As in so many other portraits by Bronzino, this lily white hand poses in the foreground, displaying its beauty and elegance to our admiring gaze. There is, in the end, an incongruity between the hard armor and the soft hand, the overpowering strength and the delicate refinement, the heroic man of decisive action and the well-mannered courtier devoted to the finer things. This incongruity appears in stark outlines when we compare this portrait of Cosimo to Bronzino’s portrait of a feminized, beautifully naked Cosimo as Orpheus, famed musician and lover of young men. [iii] Here we see the other side of the ideal nobleman extensively praised in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier - the prince as cultivated, fashionable, polite, skilled in the “feminine” arts of music, art, dance, gardens, poetry, conversation, and amorous feeling. This, too, was an important persona cultivated by Cosimo who commissioned many peaceful scenes of good government, justice, wisdom and learning, cultural patronage, golden age, and nature’s prosperity. It was this side which appeared in portraits of Cosimo as Orpheus and Apollo (both famous, among other things, for their love affairs with men).