Portrait d'un jeune homme au livre

Bronzino made this around 1540 in Florence, where he was court painter to Duke Cosimo de' Medici, and portraits like it set the fashion for the whole Medici circle. The young man holds a book with a finger keeping his place, the mark of a cultivated gentleman, and wears a severe black doublet against bare pale architecture. Look at the furniture, though, and it turns strange. Little grotesque masks are carved into the table and the arm of his chair, the kind of playful invention Florentine designers delighted in just then. Everything else is cool and guarded, held at arm's length, exactly the composed impression the Medici court wanted its people to project. Who the young man actually was, the picture never tells us.