Agnolo di Cosimo Il Bronzino was an Italian painter considered the most outstanding artist of the Tuscan Mannerist style.
As a painter at the Medici court in Florence, he made a large number of portraits and religious paintings. His style, which is influenced by his teacher Jacopo da Pontormo, is distant, refined, aristocratic, and technically brilliant in the execution of details and colors. His religious-themed works, such as Christ in Limbo (1552, Santa Croce, Florence), show the typical characteristics of Mannerism, such as the elongation of the forms and the variegated and angular composition.
His portraits, although with highly stylized lines and elegant poses, achieve a formal rigidity that represents the maximum refinement of that mannerist quality. A famous example is the coldness and brilliance of the Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1535, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In the Prado Museum, Madrid, the work Don García de Médicis is preserved.
His influence on portraiture reached the 19th century French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
