Study of a Young Woman in Three-quarter Bust-Length ca. 1540–42 Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano) Italian The surviving corpus of securely attributed drawings by Bronzino numbers around sixty-two, or so sheets. This is by all accounts an extraordinarily small number for a Tuscan artist of his generation. The Museum was fortunate to acquire this drawing which was unknown until its discovery at auction in 2013. It is a sketch after a living model, and belongs with a small group of Bronzino's sheets of ca. 1540-45 for the frescoes and altarpiece in the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo (Palazzo V

Study of a Young Woman in Three-quarter Bust-Length ca. 1540–42 Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano) Italian The surviving corpus of securely attributed drawings by Bronzino numbers around sixty-two, or so sheets. This is by all accounts an extraordinarily small number for a Tuscan artist of his generation. The Museum was fortunate to acquire this drawing which was unknown until its discovery at auction in 2013. It is a sketch after a living model, and belongs with a small group of Bronzino's sheets of ca. 1540-45 for the frescoes and altarpiece in the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo (Palazzo Vecchio, Florence), because of its style, technique, design, and pictorial approach to life drawing. As is seen here, the most plentiful kind of drawing by Bronzino to have survived, his life-studies of the figure (or "ritratti dal naturale") are quietly about the humble, flesh-and-blood models who were his subjects, and who posed in the studio for the invention of his pictures. The Met’s study is drawn in the artist’s typical style and technique of the early 1540s in black chalk on off-white paper that was prepared with a thinly applied gray-blue wash layer; the paper on the verso is left without color. The closest comparison for the Met’s drawing is Bronzino’s life study of ca. 1540-41, for St. Michael on the vault fresco of the Chapel of Eleonora (Musée du Louvre 6356, Paris), which exhibits an identical technique of execution in black chalk on off-white paper colored with a preparation of gray-blue wash: the paper on the verso is left similarly unprepared. The technique of Bronzino’s modello of ca. 1540 for the vault fresco of the chapel (Städelsches Kunstinstitut 4344, Frankfurt), which was probably produced before the architect Giambattista di Marco del Tasso had fully completed the building (hence the great differences of design), is also similarly on off-white paper prepared with gray-blue wash, although it was drawn with a combination of media in pen and b

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