From Library Journal
Masquerading as a large-format coffee-table book, this accomplished scholarly production is an elegantly written and highly detailed analysis of a fresco cycle in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. Beginning with a history of the Florentine Medici dynasty and the Palazzo's patrons Duke Cosimo I de Medici and Eleonora di Toledo, Cox-Rearick contextualizes Bronzino's decoration of the chapel within Duke Cosimo's art-patronage career. The author argues that the frescoes are a central work of Florentine art and as such established an iconography of power and erotic allegory utilized throughout later Renaissance painting and biblical narratives. Subjecting each fresco panel to a meticulous analysis of its formal and narrative elements, she leans heavily on contemporary documentary evidence of the chapel's completion and makes effective use of illustrations to reveal influences on Bronzino among classical sculpture and medieval painting. Indeed, the impressive, painstaking research involved makes this book a landmark event in the study of painting and an item that would be a very valuable addition to all academic art collections.- Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Ca.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Do the sacred decorations of a Florentine Renaissance chapelsaints, symbols, and scriptural storieshold personal and political meanings? Cox-Rearick's ground-breaking book explores the message hidden in the frescoes and altar panels of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, painted in the early 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino for the Spanish-born wife of Duke Cosimo I de Medici. Bronzino, then the chief painter to the Medici court, was largely responsible for the invention in Florence of the highly self-conscious, elegant Maniera style. Cox-Rearick interweaves her account of the Medici biography with an examination of Bronzino's commission in the broader context of his oeuvre. Cox-Rearick reveals the Chapel of Eleonora as an intimately devised decorative program that transmits messages about its patrons and Medici rule. Detailed color photographs of the newly restored art splendidly document this early tour de force of a major artist whose works are still relatively unexamined.


From the Back Cover
"Cox-Rearick indicates that the iconographic program of the chapel was, from its initiation, linked to an astonishing degree to the fortunesactual and anticipatedof the young Duke Cosimo and that the successive changes in the chapel were occasioned by political events and by revised and increasingly ambitious Medici pretensions." (Malcolm Campbell, University of Pennsylvania)


About the Author
Jane Cox-Rearick is a Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos (1984).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Do the sacred decorations of a Florentine Renaissance chapel￯﾿ﾽsaints, symbols, and scriptural stories￯﾿ﾽhold personal and political meanings? Cox-Rearick's ground-breaking book explores the message hidden in the frescoes and altar panels of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, painted in the early 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino for the Spanish-born wife of Duke Cosimo I de Medici. Bronzino, then the chief painter to the Medici court, was largely responsible for the invention in Florence of the highly self-conscious, elegant Maniera style. Cox-Rearick interweaves her account of the Medici biography with an examination of Bronzino's commission in the broader context of his oeuvre. Cox-Rearick reveals the Chapel of Eleonora as an intimately devised decorative program that transmits messages about its patrons and Medici rule. Detailed color photographs of the newly restored art splidly document this early tour de force of a major artist whose works are still relatively unexamined.

Author Biography: Jane Cox-Rearick is a Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos (1984).

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal