Dante Pops Up Again!
Bronzino, Portrait of Laura Battiferri (c. 1555-60)
No art historian has yet commented, positively or otherwise, on how the presence of Dante’s profile in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement makes sense within the overall concept that Michelangelo himself pronounced: “every painter paints himself.” Nevertheless, Elizabeth Cropper has recently claimed that Bronzino altered the features of Laura Battiferri to give her Dante’s nose. Playing off her name and Dante’s beloved Laura, Battiferri, a poet herself, becomes the female equivalent of Dante, the essence of poetry.1
1. Cropper, "Reading Bronzino's Florentine Portraits" in Bronzino (Palazzo Strozzi) 2010, p. 248
Posted 05 Nov 2010: BronzinoMichelangeloExhibitionsPortraiture
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