MEAN BOYS Bronzino’s Portrait of Lodovico Capponi

Daniel Mendelsohn

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,

Bronzino

Guidobaldo II della Rovere, 1531–32

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

Galleria

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 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

Pastorino

Copper alloy

2 3 4 in. (706 mm)

The

Milanese

315⁄16 in. (100.2 mm) Scher Collection