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.
Bronzino's Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio
About the Book
Reviews
"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 PennsylvaniaAwards
- 1994 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award. This Award is presented annually to publications which exemplify excellence in art publishing., Art Library Society of North America