PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence, through February 13, 2005.

“Anyone who is enchanted by the lure of Italy and its extraordinary artistic legacy in painting and drawing will find this to be an especially auspicious time to visit the Museum,” said Anne d’Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“When Amilcare Pizzi, the renowned publisher in Milan of the Great Italian Drawings series invited us to offer a selection from our collection for publication we were deeply honored. We therefore decided to celebrate with an exhibition of our remarkable Italian drawings, organized by our Curator of drawings, Ann Percy. In a separate undertaking, the two-year-long conservation and technical analysis of the Museum’s splendid portrait by Pontormo of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, by our paintings conservation department, has led to another important exhibition, organized by Carl Brandon Strehlke, Adjunct Curator of the John G. Johnson Collection. Focusing on the two great 16th-century Medici portraits in the Museum which are joined by major loans from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and other exceptional collections, this jewel of an exhibition traces the role of portraiture and the elevation of drawing in Renaissance Florence. At the same time, the Museum will publish Dr. Strehlke’s long-awaited catalogue of Italian painting from the late medieval and early Renaissance period in the Museum. It is the first thorough study of many of these paintings since Bernard Berenson catalogued them in 1913. His book provides a splendid capstone for our celebration of Italian art in the coming year.”

This exhibition addresses the public and private nature of portraiture and the elevation of drawing in 16th century Florentine art through a careful selection of paintings and drawings from both American and European collections as well as coins, medals, and prints. Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence presents some 45 works and will include 16 drawings lent by the drawing and print department of the Uffizi in Florence, which holds the world’s greatest cache of drawings by Pontormo and Bronzino.

Central to the exhibition’s focus are two portraits from the Museum’s collection by the great 16th-century Florentine masters Pontormo and Bronzino, depicting the Dukes Alessandro and Cosimo I de’ Medici. These two paintings have inspired an explanation of the ways in which the Renaissance portrait was transformed by these two Florentine masters in the decade that spanned the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1529, the brief reign of Alessandro, and the beginning of the reign of his cousin Cosimo I, who became duke in 1537 after the assassination of his cousin Alessandro. Bronzino’s striking portrait of Cosimo I shows the duke in the guise of Orpheus, and is often thought to be an allegorical commentary on his future marriage to Eleonora da Toledo. In his masterful painting of Alessandro of 1534-35, Pontormo depicts the duke in the unusual task of making a metalpoint drawing, demonstrating not only the importance of drawing as a cultivated activity for privileged Florentines, but also the status it was given in the hierarchy of the arts. The portrait celebrates the duke’s own abilities as a draftsman and drawing itself as a humanist activity and the basis of all art. The work by Pontormo has undergone a delicate restoration and technical study, the results of which are celebrated in this exhibition.