Bronzino

Agnolo di Cosimo trained under Pontormo in Florence, absorbing the elongated forms and spatial tricks of early Mannerism. By his late 30s he'd become court painter to Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, spending the rest of his life there. He churned out portraits of the Medici clan - many in multiple versions, as Cosimo pioneered the copied portrait as diplomatic gift - and painted religious works alongside the occasional allegory like Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (c. 1544-45). Where his teacher's figures writhed with emotion, Bronzino's stood calm, reserved, almost glacial. Critics in the 19th and early 20th centuries found them cold and artificial, part of the broader disfavour that buried Mannerism for generations. The last few decades have been kinder.