Agnolo Bronzino

Title: Bronzino's Lodovico Capponi

Authors: Daniel Mendelsohn and Aimee Ng

Publisher: The Frick Collection in association with D Giles Limited (2023)

Details: Hardcover, 7 3/4 x 9 1/2 in., 72 pages, 38 color illustrations

ISBN: 9781913875350

In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Curator Aimee Ng explores the life of Lodovico Capponi, the subject of a 16th-century portrait at the Frick by Agnolo Bronzino. A page at the Medici court, Lodovico had the misfortune of falling in love with a Florentine noblewoman whom Duke Cosimo I intended to marry to one of his cousins.

The Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino is best known as court artist to the Medici and many of his most famous works are portraits of the ducal family. Yet Bronzino completed a number of paintings before his association with Duke Cosimo’s court began. This lecture shows how certain of these earlier works respond to an altogether different political atmosphere, one in which republican culture still thrived in defiant, if sometimes furtive, manifestations.

This lecture is made possible by the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation

Aimee Ng, Guest Curator, introduces the exhibition The Poetry of Parmigianino's "Schiava Turca," on view at the Frick from May 12, 2014 through July 20, 2014. This video will be on view in the Music Room during the run of the exhibition.