Venustas et gratia: il Bronzino e il ritratto di Laura Battiferri

• Autores: Stefania Pasti
• Localización: Commentari d'arte: rivista di critica e storia dell'arte, Vol. 19, Nº. 54-55, 2013, págs. 62-77
• Idioma: italiano
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• Resumen

  • The portrait of Laura Battiferri is one of Bronzino's most enigmatic paintings, since, in spite of their mutual friendship and esteem, he intentionally depicts her in a most unattractive way. Actually, it must have been her own wish to be represented not as a beauty, but as a woman of learning, who, being herself a poetess, was admitted into the exclusive circle of the most renewed men of letters of her time. She was the only woman who received the great honour to be admitted in the "Accademia degli Intronati" in Siena, and she significantly chose as her academic nickname "La Sgraziata" (The Graceless), to underline that her qualities were not the female ones of beauty, but the male ones of intellect and culture. Here is the only profile portrait painted by Bronzino, but years before he had already done the luscious profile of the Venus of the "Allegory", now in London, where the painter's inspiration seems to follow the beauty standards set by Agnolo Firenzuola in his dialogue "Celso" concerning precisely feminine beauty. It could therefore be thought that both profiles, Battiferri's and Venus', were, even after a lapse of time, intended to be complementary, as in a dialectic relationshhip of opposites.