This painting is clearly derived from Bronzino’s portraits, both in the full, rounded
shapes of the hands and face that seem pervaded by cool, clear light and in the taught,
fine, almost glassy painting that defines the shiny cloth of the fur-lined cape, and the
spotted fur itself. The stark simplicity of the monochrome background with just a
circle of light around Francesco’s face that suggests an illusory depth also recalls the
same sources. We see similar interpretations of Bronzino’s style in other works by
Alessandro Allori – who studied with the artist and to whom this picture is attributed.
Allori’s work as a portraitist is mentioned by sources starting from his sojourn in
Rome that ended in 1559 when he returned to Florence.
During the years in Rome, Allori was already recognized for his skill in painting
portraits, and Vincenzo Borghini mentioned how, even as a young man “in
Bronzino’s school he, like all his fellow pupils, was inclined to portraits”. Again in Il
Riposo, Borghini wrote about the “infinite portraits Alessandro Allori painted for
princes, lords and gentlemen”.
Some frescoed portraits in the Monauto Chapel in the church of Santissima
Annunziata date from the years immediately following his return to Florence, between
1559 and 1560, as do the Portrait of Francesco I de’ Medici conserved in the Poggio
Imperiale (ill. 1), the Portrait of a Young Man, in the Hermitage which Philippe
Costamagna has dated 1562, and the Portrait of a Young Man Writing in the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston (ill. 2), that was also painted in the early 1560s.
In the paintings Allori produced in the late 1560s, he combined Bronzinesque
elements with an austere chromatic tone and a new fullness of shape that came from
his studies of ancient sculptures and – mainly - the works of Michelangelo. However,
when compared with the cited paintings, our portrait has a clear light and smoother,
more subtle paint surface that would shift its dating to later years when Allori drew
closer to the more contracted shapes of Bronzino’s final period and added a
propensity for naturalistic effects that heralded the counterreformation turnaround of
the final decades of his career. It is mainly in Allori’s religious paintings done after
1580 that the master’s smooth luminous painting gave way to a tactile sensitivity in
defining the details of the clothing (here the fur on the cape is soft and almost a bit
tousled), revealing the Venetian influences that were also evident in the works of
other Florentine artists of the day.