Bronzino's Lodovico Capponi

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BRONZINO’S LODOVICO CAPPONI

Daniel Mendelsohn

Aimee Ng

The Frick Collection, New York in association with D Giles Limited

MEAN BOYS

Bronzino’s Portrait of Lodovico Capponi

1. Etymology

It took fifteen centuries for the Latin word solus (alone) to become the English word sullen.

First, at some unknowable moment late in antiquity, solus—a fairly straightforward adjective—gave birth to a moody derivative, solanus (solitary). Then, long after every Roman citizen who’d ever complained (or dreamed) of being solanus was ashes and dust, that word, eroded over five centuries on the tips of a hundred thousand tongues, arrived in Old French as solain. From there, it was but a short step to the Middle English soleyn (solitary, averse to company), which, in 1400 or so, at the beginning of the Renaissance, began to assume its current meaning, “bad-tempered, surly, sulky, pouting, sour, morose.” Once its sense was crystallized, all that was left was for soleyn to achieve its modern spelling, which it did around 1550, just around the time when the Italian painter Bronzino was completing his portrait of the Florentine aristocrat Lodovico Capponi.

2. “Emotion”

Few portrait sitters are as solitary, as utterly alone, in their rectangles of canvas or wood as those of Bronzino.

People who know about Bronzino like to talk about the lack of emotion in his work. They focus, rather, on the impressively self-conscious formal elegance of both his style and his sitters, singling it out for either praise or blame,

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Bronzino

Guidobaldo II della Rovere, 1531–32

Oil on panel, 44 7⁄ 8 × 33 7 8 in. (114 × 86 cm)

Galleria

23
Fig. 2 Palatina e Appartamenti Reali, Florence Fig. 1 Photograph of Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi by Goupil et Cie. From Pourtalès-Gorgier 1863, no. 13.

Bronzino

Oil on panel

33 7 8 × 25 5⁄16 in. (86 × 66.8 cm)

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation Purchase, 1996

Oil on panel

451⁄4 × 37 13⁄16 in. (115 × 96 cm)

Daniele da Volterra’s assignment in 1565 to paint over all the genitals in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (only partially removed in the late twentieth century). Frick was known for his somewhat conservative taste in art and never saw his Bronzino in its unedited state. One can only speculate as to whether he would have acquired it if he had. Conservation treatment revealed the codpiece in 1949, thirty years after Frick’s death.4

Lodovico Capponi’s name must have been divorced from the portrait sometime between 1806—when it was listed as a likeness of Lodovico in an

AIMEE NG 26
Fig. 5 Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor, ca. 1545 Fig. 6 Bronzino Eleonora di Toledo with Her Son Giovanni, ca. 1545 Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

a portrait made thirty years earlier, when the fifty-somethingyear-old was no more than twenty-one. Much had happened in the intervening decades, from marriage and eight children to duels and excommunication from the Catholic Church.13 By the time Lodovico turned thirty, he had made enough enemies to seek permission from the Duke of Florence to wear armor on the city streets.14 It is tempting to connect his special dispensation with the choice to depict him wearing armor in Poccetti’s portrait, which in every other way, down to the curls of the hair, faithfully imitates Bronzino’s painting.

The Frick portrait’s standing subject faces frontally, turned slightly to the viewer’s left so that his left ear is visible. Slashed sleeves reveal another layer of sumptuous white fabric beneath, and embroidered cuffs adorn his wrists, while a short, ruffled collar emerges from his jerkin. With a black mantle wrapped behind him, draped over his right arm and pinned to his hip with his left, his clothing echoes the black and white of the Capponi coat of arms (fig. 8).15 He casts no shadow on the vibrant green backdrop, which is activated with creases and bunches. In his left hand, a folded pair of brown gloves signals status and elegance. Their removal exposes long, slender hands, typical in Bronzino’s portraiture, and his right hand supports with two fingertips a small, circular object, a framed medal or cameo, his index finger obscuring much of it from view (fig. 9).16

What can be seen of the object are fragments resembling the general forms of a female bust, as found on medals of the period, with the horizontal neckline of a woman’s bodice and truncated sleeve appearing below Lodovico’s finger, and lines of styled long hair above. A contemporaneous medal of Girolama Sacrati presents similar elements in reverse (fig. 10). Above Lodovico’s finger, as if part of a legend circumscribing the medal, appears in tiny script the word sorte (meaning “fate” or “fortune” in Italian, “by fate” or “by fortune” in Latin). The two-tone coloring of the figure and text, all in white on a black ground, mirrors Lodovico’s clothing and suggests that it is made in colored wax (such as fig. 11) or carved cameo. Whether it was inspired by an object

AIMEE NG 30
*
*
*
Fig. 8 The Capponi coat of arms in the courtyard of Palazzo Capponi-Vettori. From Vasetti 2001, p. 18. Fig. 9 (opposite, top) Detail of Lodovico Capponi (frontispiece)

Pastorino

Copper alloy

2 3 4 in. (706 mm)

The

Milanese

315⁄16 in. (100.2 mm) Scher Collection

BRONZINO’S LODOVICO CAPPONI 31
Fig. 10 da Siena (Pastorino de’ Pastorini) Girolama Sacrati, dated 1555 Frick Collection; Gift of Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher, 2022 Fig. 11 School Ferrante Loffredo, mid-16th century Wax on glass
50
Fig. 26 View of the Great Hall of Palazzo Capponi-Vettori, Florence

Lodovico’s portrait as that at the Frick, the three female sitters appeared to be portraits of young girls with no hint that one might be Lodovico’s wife.62

It is unclear why the suite of Lodovico’s family portraits was left unfinished, and tempting to see echoed in its failure the erosion of the family, beginning in the early 1580s, stemming from conflicts between Lodovico and his children, principally his son Bernardino, and his wife. Whereas there are unfinished portraits in the Medici decoration at Palazzo Vecchio, for the Capponi family, the series appears not so much incomplete as barely begun, with the majority of the ovals devoid of portraits.63 In a book consisting of notable sites in Florence published in 1591, shortly after Poccetti’s last payment for the frescoes, Francesco Bocchi lauded the decoration of Lodovico’s Great Hall with pages of detailed description of the frescoes.64 He made no mention, however, of the portraits of Lodovico’s family, finished or unfinished, perhaps implying the limited impact Bocchi perceived them to have in the overall scheme. Or, perhaps, they were best left unacknowledged because of the painter’s failure to complete them.

Bernardino Poccetti

Portrait of a Female Sitter, detail from the fresco decoration of the Great Hall of Palazzo CapponiVettori, Florence, ca. 1583–88. From Vasetti 2001, p. 121.

Bernardino Poccetti

Portrait of a Female Sitter, detail from the fresco decoration of the Great Hall of Palazzo CapponiVettori, Florence, ca. 1583–88. From Vasetti 2001, p. 85.

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Fig. 27 Fig. 28

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