Agnolo Bronzino represents anoher pole of mannerist painting in Florence. While the mannerists stressed human striving and emotion, Bronzino developed a new and colder style. He also reintroduced the older Renaissance concept of harmony and symmetry in his paintings; whereas early mannerst paintings strove to unbalance the figures and geometry in a painting, Bronzino sought to foreground this balance and symmetry as one of the primary objects of the painting. While his “Venus Disarming Cupid” is his most famous painting for its rigid symmetry and its chilling eroticism, the “Portrait of a Young Man” is equally famous as a portrait. The figure itself is emotionless to the point of not being human, but it occupies a highly ordered and balanced space of which it is a part.
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