Alegoria da Fortuna

By the 1560s Bronzino had spent decades as the polished court painter to Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, and this small panel, painted on copper around 1567, is court art in miniature. At its center a woman stands raised above the crowd, holding a cornucopia spilling fruit and a ship's rudder, the old attributes of Fortune, who steers lives the way a helmsman steers a boat. Figures press around her in the cool, enamel-smooth colors and stretched poses that were the house style of the Medici court. It is the kind of learned allegory a duke's circle was expected to read like a puzzle, every object standing for an idea.