Die Kreuzabnahme Christi

Bronzino painted this as the altarpiece for a tiny private chapel inside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the chapel of Eleonora of Toledo, wife of the Medici duke Cosimo. He finished it in the mid 1540s, all cool colour and polished, weightless bodies lowering Christ from the cross. Then Cosimo did something unexpected. He shipped the finished painting off as a diplomatic gift to Nicolas de Granvelle, a powerful adviser to the emperor Charles the Fifth, partly to keep pace with a rival family who had given the Granvelles a fine antique sculpture. Bronzino simply painted a second version to fill the empty chapel back home. The original travelled north to Granvelle's estate in Besançon, in eastern France, where it has stayed ever since.