L'Adoration des bergers

Bronzino painted this small Nativity around 1539, just as his life was about to change. That year Florence celebrated the wedding of its young duke, Cosimo de' Medici, to Eleonora of Toledo, and Bronzino was among the artists who dressed the city for the festivities. The work brought him inside the Medici court, where he would spend the rest of his career as its portrait painter, giving the family the cool, polished, almost enamelled surface we now think of as high Florentine Mannerism. You can see that finish here in miniature, the smooth limbs and clear colours, the shepherds arriving in careful, statue-like poses with none of the usual rustic bustle. It is a cabinet-sized panel, made to be held and studied up close rather than set above an altar. Bronzino had trained under Pontormo, and the twisting, elegant figures are the language he took from that teacher.