Artwork · 16th century · Bronzino

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Portrait of a Young Man

Bronzino1530sOil on wood95.6 × 74.9 cm

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At a glance

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A young man dressed in black stands with one hand on a book and the other on his hip, glancing off to the side.
The Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino painted it in oil on wood in the 1530s.
No one knows who the young man was. His face is calm, but grimacing carved faces hide in the table and the chair beside him.

Reading the picture

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Zoom in on his face. His skin is smooth, his brows are thin, and his eyes slide away to the right instead of meeting ours. Small gold ornaments are stuck all around his black cap. His expression gives away almost nothing, which makes you wonder what he is thinking.
Zoom in on the hand on the left. He has slipped one finger between the pages of a book standing on its end. He is keeping his place. The gilded edge of the pages meets his long, pale fingers.
Look at the bottom left corner, under the tabletop. A carved face squeezes its eyes shut and twists its mouth. Something like cloth hangs down over its forehead. It is the exact opposite of the composed young man above it.
Zoom in on the arm of the chair at lower right. Another monstrous face is carved here, with a bulging nose, thick lips, and something like a curled animal horn on its head. It sits just under his black sleeve, so at first it is easy to miss.
Look at the left hand resting on his hip. His fingers spread wide across a blue sash, and a gold ring set with a red stone sits on one of his lower fingers. His elbow juts outward in a pose of easy confidence.

When it was painted

In the fall of 1529, an army surrounded Florence. The emperor and the pope wanted the Medici family, who had been driven out, back in power. The city held out until it surrendered the next summer. Bronzino, then in his late twenties, left for Pesaro around that time.

In Pesaro he helped decorate a villa for the della Rovere dukes. He also painted the duke's young son Guidobaldo, a portrait that now hangs in the Pitti Palace in Florence. Around 1532 his old teacher Pontormo called him home. The two were close for decades. Vasari even wrote that the boy sitting on the steps in Pontormo's Joseph in Egypt is Bronzino as a child.

The Florence he came back to was now ruled by Medici dukes. Bronzino was more than a painter. He wrote playful, mocking poems and spent time with the city's writers. The Met believes this young man belonged to that literary world, and that the book under his hand is probably poetry.

In 1539 Bronzino helped design the decorations for the wedding of Cosimo I de' Medici and Eleonora of Toledo. He went on to become the Medici court painter, turning out polished, cool portraits of the ducal family. Centuries later this picture crossed the Atlantic. It came to the Met in 1929 as part of the bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer.

We still do not know the young man's name. The museum suggests that his smooth, controlled face may be a kind of mask in itself. Look from his face to the scowling carved face on the table corner and back again. Which one seems more honest?

The painter

Bronzino

1503–1572

All paintings by Bronzino →

Portrait of a Young Man

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you find both of the monster faces hidden in the table and the chair?
Why?Why do you think Bronzino put twisted, ugly faces right next to such a composed young man?
What about you?This young man shows who he is through a book, a ring, and a pose. If you had one photo to present yourself today, what would you hold, and how would you stand?

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