This catalogue is a fine record of the recent Bronzino paintings exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence — certainly the best installed event there since the Primiato del disegno of 1980. At the top of the stairs, visitors encountered — for the first time at eye level — the four tondos of the evangelists from Santa Felicita, variously assigned, since Vasari, to Pontormo or Bronzino. But here their symbiosis is so complete that it is near impossible to tell master and pupil apart. Other famous pictures never looked better; viewers reveled in details like Bartolomeo Panciatichi's dog and the estuary behind Eleonora da Toledo in masterworks released from the darkness of the Uffizi's Tribuna. The silk-, gold-, and silver-threaded Joseph tapestries hung next to portraits of the Medici were justly meant to overwhelm us with the court's magnificence. The double-sided portrayal of the naked ducal dwarf Morgante setting out and returning from a bird hunt — fresh from a decades-long restoration — was installed among contemporary sculpture as eloquent, yet burlesque, proof of Bronzino's response to Benedetto Varchi's question about what is the nobler art. The penultimate gallery populated with portraits — elegant, sometimes frosty, but always very human — was witness to why, despite the twists and turns in his critical fortunes, viewers have always come back to the artist. Proust had an infatuated Charlus speak about his young Morel coming into his own as an “espèce de Bronzino”; likewise the portraits infatuate as Bronzino knew the genre could, having produced the Pygmalion myth in the Uffizi as a cover to Pontormo's adolescent Florentine halberdier.

The artist has been such a focus of scholarly activity in the last decades, including a display of his drawings in New York in 2010, that it may seem exaggerated to state that the Palazzo Strozzi show was revolutionary — but it was in that the curators, Antonio Natali and Carlo Falciani, have not only represented current directions in research on the artist and Florentine maniera, but presented new material and interpretations that will help clear more roads in the forest. Essays introduce each section of the catalogue and are followed by interpretative entries for the works: Elizabeth Cropper on the artist's critical fortunes and also the portraits, Natali on his early years and also Eleonora's chapel, Massimo Firpo on the Medici, Falciani on the Panciatichi and also religious paintings, Massimiliano Rossi on the poetry, Marco Collareta on the system of the arts, Alessandro Cherubini on Bronzino's favorite Alessandro Allori, and Francesca De Luca on Bronzino in local collections.

While the show did not play many attribution games, there was plenty of fodder for those who wished to do so. It was interesting to see the small Uffizi Madonna and Saints being downgraded from formerly Pontormo then Bronzino to Mirabello Cavalori. Visitors could decide between two versions of the allegorical Dante (one owned privately and the other in Washington) and wonder — as I did — why the poorly preserved former one won the curators’ hearts. And connoisseurs might still want to make the call on paintings in private hands of Saint Cosmas, identified as from Eleonora's chapel, and of Christ bearing the cross, presented here as discoveries.

At the exhibition's center was the room for the Panciatichi including a newly attributed painting in Nice of the crucified Christ set against a stone niche and identified as the one Vasari described among their possessions. As a crucifix-icon referencing a polychromed sculpture of a crucifix on an altar, the picture cannot but be tied to the couple's reformist sympathies and its adhesion to the heretic doctrine of justification by faith alone. (Bartolomeo was tried by the Inquisition and his books burned.) Falciani and Cropper each see the Panciatichis’ convictions as central to Bronzino's portrayal of Lucrezia analyzing the motto sans fin amour dure sans on her chain as a reference to the Psalms in French vulgate and her splendid attire — for Henry James “brocaded and wasted reds” — as that of a devotee donned in magnificence to appear before the lord. With interpretations like these, this catalogue sets the stage for a new nuanced understanding of Bronzino that does not, as its title would have it, see him just in terms of a Medici courtier.