Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, c. 1537–39, oil on panel, 114.3 x 96.5 x 10.5 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Documentation mysteries
Most artworks come to us without surviving documentation, an artist’s signature, let alone an explanation. In such cases, art historians use a variety of evidence to make an informed assessment. Often, what is absent is as telling as what is present. While some questions cannot be definitively answered, compelling explanations can emerge from analyzing related artworks, historical context, and the object itself.
The painting displayed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as Cosimo I as Orpheus by Agnolo Bronzino with a creation date range of c. 1537–39 is an example of an object that has arrived in the 21st century without much documentation. We have no contract that might tell us definitively who painted the artwork, what it depicts, when it was made, and who wanted this image enough to commission it, i.e. a patron. The earliest potential reference to Cosimo I as Orpheus dates to the 1650s, over a century after we think the painting was made.
The painting
The Philadelphia portrait is an unusual artwork. An almost entirely nude man occupies the foreground of the composition and most of the surface of the canvas. The nearly life-sized figure turns to make eye contact with the viewer. The background offers few clues. Only a small path over the figure’s right shoulder and a fiery lake briefly interrupt the murky brown background. Three canine heads, one barely visible, appear in front of the man whose hands are occupied with a musical instrument. In his left hand, the figure gently grasps a lira da braccio, a string instrument associated with poetry. Many have seen a visual pun between the shape of the instrument’s pegbox shape and female genitalia. In his right hand, the man fingers a bow positioned between his legs at the groin pointing up like an erect phallus.
Left: Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, oil on panel, 114.3 x 96.5 x 10.5 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art); right: Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor, c. 1545, oil on panel, 76 x 59 cm (National Museum in Poznań)
The composition indicates a mythological subject. Italian Renaissance viewers found ribald elements more appropriate when presented through the both culturally elevated and distancing realm of ancient myth. Italian Renaissance paintings frequently depicted figures from Greek and Roman myth nude. The idealization of the figure’s muscular body and unblemished flesh adhere to conventions for mythological subjects as well. The specificity of the figure’s face, however, suggests a portrait of a specific individual. The likeness known from many other portraits of Cosimo identifies the sitter as Cosimo I, Duke of Florence and eventually the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. The other portraits, however, feature a fully clothed man presented as himself, a 16th-century aristocrat, not in the guise of mythological hero.
Investigation
Connoisseurial analysis has led to the consensus that the painting was made by Agnolo Bronzino, the artist who worked at Cosimo I’s court as his primary portrait painter. His compositions served as a template for other artists to copy. Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor has thirteen known surviving copies. So it’s tempting to analyze Cosimo I as Orpheus as one of Bronzino’s many renditions of the Florentine leader. The nudity and sexual explicitness of the painting, however, marks it an outlier among the otherwise decorous portraits.
Agnolo Bronzino, Eleonora of Toledo, 1543, oil on panel, 59 x 46 cm (National Gallery, Prague)
Assuming the portrait’s sexual innuendo implied an intimate relationship between sitter and viewer, 20th-century art historians generally considered the painting a gift to Cosimo I’s bride, Eleonora of Toledo, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s viceroy in Naples, whom he married in 1539. The Orpheus myth (as told by ancient Roman authors Ovid, Virgil, and Boethius) concerns an unusually strong marital bond.
A love story abruptly turns tragic when Orpheus’s wife Eurydice dies suddenly. Playing music to soothe Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the underworld, Orpheus descended into the realm of the dead to find his wife. His music so moved Hades, the god of the underworld, that he agreed to let Eurydice return to the land of the living—with one condition: Orpheus must walk ahead of Eurydice without turning back before they reach the upper world. Close to the surface, Orpheus’s faith faltered; he turned back to see Eurydice vanish back to the underworld.
Though the myth relates a marital devotion deep enough to challenge death, a painting implying masturbation would have made a highly unusual wedding present for an upper-class bride in 16th-century Italy. Though some later versions vary, Eurydice dies on her wedding day, making the painting’s subject discordant with nuptial festivities. Furthermore, there is no record of the Orpheus portrait in Medici collections. Giorgio Vasari, the writer who covered much of Italian Renaissance art history, does not mention the painting though he discussed other Bronzino portraits of Cosimo in the 1568 edition of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. [1] The first archival mention of what we think is the Philadelphia painting comes in an inventory of artworks owned by Simone di Giovanni di Berti and compiled by himself in the 1650s. [2]
Belvedere Torso, 1st century B.C.E., marble, 1.59 m high (Vatican Museums; photo: Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Who else might have commissioned this ribald yet learned portrait—and for whom? Classically educated viewers would have recognized the composition’s direct reference to the ancient Belvedere Torso sculpture, which the Renaissance believed portrayed the mythological figure Hercules. Cosimo I continued the Medici family habit of invoking Hercules. Cosimo had included the image of the ancient hero on his seals and medals. Interestingly, after the painting was essentially complete, Bronzino reworked the composition to make it more sexual. The figure lost drapery; the bow, already a Renaissance pun for masturbation, moved from a horizontal to an upright position. A dog’s head pivoted to stare directly at Cosimo’s crotch.
Cosimo I came to power after the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, on January 6, 1537. Because he was only eighteen and descended from the Medici family matrilineally, it’s likely that the Florentine senators who selected him assumed he would be easy to control. That was not the case. Cosimo took a heavy hand in Florentine politics immediately. Importantly for our purposes, he created the Accademia Fiorentina, an academy promoting Tuscan dialect as a literary language in 1541. Berti, who wrote the aforementioned inventory (that includes the first archival mention of what we think is the Philadelphia painting), was a member of the Accademia Fiorentina’s successor, the Accademia della Crusca.
Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Andrea Doria as Neptune, c. 1545–46, oil on canvas, 149 x 199.5 cm (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan)
We must consider the possibility that Cosimo did not commission the portrait of himself as Orpheus at all. The closest related picture to the Orpheus portrait is another painting by Bronzino, a portrait of Genovese sea captain Andrea Doria—as Neptune. We see the 16th-century captain out of uniform, nude save for a drapery threatening to slip out of place. He clutches a trident to secure the image as Neptune, but his name “A. Doria” is engraved on the wooden pier resembling a ship mast next to a sail hanging behind Doria. This painting was not commissioned by Doria, but by Paolo Giovio, a Florentine historian, scientist, and bishop of Nocera, who was assembling a collection of portraits of famous men. [3] So there is a precedent for portraits of men as mythological figures commissioned by people other than the portrayed sitter in the painting.
Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, c. 1537–39, oil on panel, 114.3 x 96.5 x 10.5 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Deliberate ambiguity?
An intriguing possibility is that the Accademia Fiorentina (or one of its members) commissioned the humorous portrait of Cosimo. Bronzino, who wrote poetry, was a member. [4] Berti’s inventory does not necessarily prove the Accademia Fiorentina commissioned or owned the image, but does tell us a state personage as Orpheus was an appealing subject for learned collectors. [5] If a political message was intended, it might have been negative. The myth of Orpheus ends not with the loss of Eurydice, but with the hero’s own death. In grief, Orpheus rejected the company of women and was then torn to pieces by bacchants he had spurned. For those disgruntled by Cosimo’s authoritarian rule, such a picture might cathartically address a like-minded group.
If the discontented commissioned Cosimo I as Orpheus, the painting’s lack of a definitive interpretation might have been protective. If the painting is indeed a joke exercised by people with few means of addressing their grievances publicly, the ambiguity would be welcome. One could liken Cosimo’s rule to the harmony produced by Orpheus’s music or simply see the painting as associating Cosimo with the arts. In that way, the painting could be interpreted as flattering to the Florentine ruler—should its owner need such a message.
