Bronzino's Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio
$95.00, £56.00 hardcover
978-0-520-07480-4
Available Now
"Cox-Rearick indicates that the iconographic program of the chapel was, from its initiation, linked to an astonishing degree to the fortunes–actual and anticipated–of the young Duke Cosimo and that the successive changes in the chapel were occasioned by political events and by revised and increasingly ambitious Medici pretensions."—Malcolm Campbell, University of Pennsylvania
Do the sacred decorations of a Florentine Renaissance chapel—saints, symbols, and scriptural stories—hold personal and political meanings? Cox-Rearick's ground-breaking book explores the message hidden in the frescoes and altar panels of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, painted in the early 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino for the Spanish-born wife of Duke Cosimo I de Medici. Bronzino, then the chief painter to the Medici court, was largely responsible for the invention in Florence of the highly self-conscious, elegant Maniera style. Cox-Rearick interweaves her account of the Medici biography with an examination of Bronzino's commission in the broader context of his oeuvre.
Cox-Rearick reveals the Chapel of Eleonora as an intimately devised decorative program that transmits messages about its patrons and Medici rule. Detailed color photographs of the newly restored art splendidly document this early tour de force of a major artist whose works are still relatively unexamined.
Cox-Rearick reveals the Chapel of Eleonora as an intimately devised decorative program that transmits messages about its patrons and Medici rule. Detailed color photographs of the newly restored art splendidly document this early tour de force of a major artist whose works are still relatively unexamined.
Winner, 1993 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, Art Libraries Society of North America