Saint Michael

For a while this panel was a Pontormo. The great scholar Roberto Longhi published it as one in 1969, three years after the museum in Turin acquired it. Then in 1973 another art historian, Luciano Berti, took it out of Pontormo's work and handed it to his pupil, the young Bronzino, and that is where it has stayed. The confusion is telling. In the mid-1520s Bronzino was barely into his twenties and still working shoulder to shoulder with Pontormo in Florence, so close to his master's manner that experts centuries later could not easily tell them apart. You can see why in Michael's clothing: the heavy, billowing drapery is pure Pontormo. The gold background behind the archangel is not original to the painting. It was added later.