The Decoration of the Chapel of Eleonora Di Toledo in the Palazzo Vecchio, Flor

PREFACE The decoration of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo in the Palazzo Vecchio, Flor- ence, is a masterpiece of the art of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), painter to the Medici court in Florence in the sixteenth century. Indeed, as the only com- plex ensemble of frescoes and panels he painted, it could be deemed the central work of his career. It is also a primary monument of the religious painting of cinquecento Florence. Just as Bronzino's splendid portraits and erotic allegories established new modes of secular painting that expressed the ideals of mid- sixteenth-century court life, so his innovative chapel paintings transformed tradi- tional biblical narratives and devotional themes according to a new aesthetic. The chapel is also the locus of the emerging personal imagery of its patron, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574), and its decorations adumbrate many of the metaphors of rule, as they have been called, that would be programmatically developed in his more overtly propagandistic later art. There has been no comprehensive, documented, and illustrated study of this central work of Florentine Renaissance art. It was the subject of a short article by Andrea Emiliani (1961) and of my own essays, one on Bronzino's preparatory studies for the decoration (1971) and two others on individual paintings in the chapel (1987, 1989). These were prolegomena to this full-scale study, in which the recently restored frescoes are also illustrated for the first time. X X V 11 I began this book in 1986 at the Getty Center for Art History and the Human- ities, whose staff and director, Kurt W. Forster, encouraged and assisted me. The Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York awarded me three grants in support of research. Further work on the project was carried out under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the National Gallery of Art, to whose staff and dean, Henry A. Millon, I am deeply grateful. I completed the book at the Harvard University Center for Italian Re- naissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence. Its director, Walter Kaiser, extended a warm welcome to me, and scholars associated with it contributed to my work: Candace Adelson, Karen-edis Barzman, Paul Barolsky, Margaret B. Haines, Wil- liam Hood, Leatrice Mendelsohn, Michael J. Rocke, Patricia Rubin, David Ruth- erford, William B. Wallace, and Hellmut Wohl. S. J. Freedberg and John Pope-Hennessy have sustained my work on Floren- tine Renaissance art over the years, and I am happy to thank them yet again here. I also thank the staffs of the libraries, archives, and museums in which I have worked, particularly those in Florence: the Kunsthistorisches Institut, the Biblio- teca Nazionale, and the Archivio di Stato. Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, director of the Galleria degli Uffizi and the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, helpfully supported my work at the Uffizi. At the Biblioteca Berenson and the Fototeca Berenson, Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi was always helpful. Thanks are also due to the Co- mune di Firenze for expediting photography and other work in the chapel. In Paris, at the Musée du Louvre, Catherine Goguel facilitated my work in many ways. Gino Corti was of great assistance in transcribing documents in Florence, and Paola Peruzzi also assisted with archival transcriptions. Daniella Dini discussed her late father's restoration of the chapel with me and made diagrams for me of the giornate of Bronzino's frescoes. Elizabeth Giansiracusa worked on the trans- lations. Antonio Quattrone photographed the Chapel of Eleonora expressly for this book. Several exceptionally generous colleagues read parts or all of late drafts of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions: Lynette Bosch, Rona Goffen, Craig Hugh Smyth, and, especially, Patricia Rubin and Malcolm Campbell. For other assistance of various kinds, I wish to thank the following colleagues: William Barcham, Mary Bergstein, Suzanne Branciforte, David Alan Brown, Pa- tricia F. Brown, William Connell, Alison Cross, Susan Flanagan, Robert Gaston, PREFACE X X V 1 1 1 Marcia B. Hall, Detlef Heikamp, James Holderbaum, Marilyn A. Lavin, Gio- vanna Lazzi, James Marrow, Peter Meller, Ruth Mellinkoff, Nicolas Penny, Eliz- abeth Pilliod, Olga Raggio, David Rosand, Robert B. Simon, Yvonne Szafran, Roger Ward, Jack Wasserman, Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, and Donald Wein- stein. I also acknowledge with pleasure the contributions of Deborah Kirshman and Stephanie Fay who, as fine arts editor and copy editor, respectively, provided en- couragement and helpful criticism. And I thank Pete Goldie for his computer expertise and assistance with the index. My greatest debt is to my husband, H. Wiley Hitchcock, whose linguistic and editorial acumen were the least part of his contribution to this book, which I lovingly dedicate to him. J.C-R. Villa I Tatti November 1990 and July 1992 PREFACE XXIX E cominciandomi da i principali e più vecchi, dirò prima d'Agnolo detto il Bronzino, pittore fiorentino veramente rarissimo e degno di tutte le lodi. (And beginning with the most important and the oldest, I shall speaksfirst of Agnolo, called Bronzino, a Florentine painter truly most rare and worthy of all praise.) —GIORGIO VASARI, LE VITE, 1568 .

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