Bronzino's Allegorical Portrait of Dante on display in the Salone dei Cinquecento

On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the City of Florence is exhibiting the Allegorical Portrait of Dante by Agnolo Bronzino in the Salone dei Cinquecento. The exhibition Bronzino and the Supreme Poet. An Allegorical Portrait of Dante in Palazzo Vecchio is promoted by the City of Florence, curated by Antonio Natali and Sergio Risaliti, and realized by MUS.E. It will be on display from Feb. 12 to May 31, 2021 and included in the museum itinerary of Palazzo Vecchio.

“In the 700th anniversary year,” declares Florence Mayor Dario Nardella, “Palazzo Vecchio is hosting, among the very first celebrations, this portrait of the Supreme Poet by Agnolo Bronzino. An exhibition that wants not only to pay homage to Dante with the art of another great Florentine artist, but also to bring back to the house of the Florentines that fellow citizen so illustrious and so vituperated in life with exile. An exhibition that is thus meant to be a kind of reconciliation of the city with one of its most beloved sons.”

“The figure of Dante,” adds Culture Councilor Tommaso Sacchi, “ideally returns to the public palace where the great man of letters was also a committed politician for his city. After the great exhibition dedicated to the Poet’s topicality and legacy with the powerful images of Massimo Sestini hosted in Santa Maria Novella, another civic museum, just a few weeks ago open again to the public after the closure imposed by health restrictions due to the pandemic, pays homage to his figure and invites to knowledge and study.”

“This of Bronzino is more than just a beautiful portrait,” comments Sergio Risaliti. "It is in fact the homage of a painter, who was also an excellent poet, to the immense Dante, a point of reference both in 16th-century lyric poetry and for the arts in general. The Commedia, a poem of man’s ascent from the underworld to Paradise, represented for every artist and for Bronzino in particular the example of an achieved formal harmony between abstract imagination and description of reality, between universal history and the particular history of real men and women. The supreme poet then was a beacon from the moral point of view in an age of political conflicts and ideological clashes. This whole set of feelings and aesthetic certainties is found in the Allegorical Portrait that now arrives in the Palazzo Vecchio. There is perhaps no more fitting place to celebrate Dante’s anniversary with the presence of the work of Agnolo Bronzino, who left high marks of his art in this building in the chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I. Not to mention the painter’s collaboration in designing the famous tapestries with the Stories of Joseph the Jew."

"To see here, in the Salone dei Cinquecento of Palazzo Vecchio, the Portrait of Dante painted by Bronzino, displayed with the prominence that in ancient times the Romans reserved for the most noble and authoritative ancestors in their residences, one has the feeling that this is where he belongs," declares Antonio Natali. "The effigy of a lofty poet, Florentine by birth, conceived by one of the greatest artists of sixteenth-century Florence and created for the room of a cultured private patron (he himself a Florentine) finds its consecration in this room of Palazzo Vecchio, which instead is par excellence public. It is like realizing Dante’s dream of being celebrated with all honors in his homeland. A dream that Dante expresses in the first verses of the XXV canto of Paradise, which are precisely those transcribed by Bronzino in the book kept in view by the poet."

According to Giorgio Vasari ’s reconstruction in The Life of Bronzino, the Allegorical Portrait of Dante, an oil on canvas dated 1532-1533, was commissioned from the painter along with portraits of Petrarch and Boccaccio to decorate a room in the home of the cultured Florentine banker Bartolomeo Bettini: in the lunettes with “poets who have with verses and Tuscan takes sung of love,” and in the center a panel with Venus and Cupid painted by Pontormo on a cartoon by Michelangelo Buonarroti, now in the Accademia Gallery. The ambitious project, which remained unfinished, involved the leading painters active in Florence at the time and anticipated themes dear to the literati of the future Accademia Fiorentina (to which Bronzino himself belonged until 1547), such as the superiority of the Tuscan language and the relationship between art and poetry.

Of the three portraits commissioned from Bronzino, only the one of Dante has reached the present day. Known in the past thanks to a preparatory drawing of the poet’s head (preserved at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich), a copy on panel (preserved in the Kress Collection of the National Gallery of art in Washington) and various graphic reproductions, it was long dispersed, until the canvas was found in a Florentine private collection and accepted by critics as the original of the Dante portrait recorded in Vasari’s biography of the artist.

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Image: Bronzino, Allegorical Portrait of Dante (1532-1533; oil on canvas, 130 x 136 cm; Private collection). Ph.Credit Mattia Marasco - MUS.E

Bronzino's Allegorical Portrait of Dante on display in the Salone dei Cinquecento

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