Bronzino, Pontormo's close follower, had none of his master's talent as
a decorator, but happily much of his power as a portrait-painter. Would
he had never attempted anything else! The nude without material or
spiritual significance, with no beauty of design or colour, the nude
simply because it was the nude, was Bronzino's ideal in composition, and
the result is his "Christ in Limbo." But as a portrait-painter, he took
up the note struck by his master and continued it, leaving behind him a
series of portraits which not only had their effect in determining the
character of Court painting all over Europe, but, what is more to the
point, a series of portraits most of which are works of art. As
painting, it is true, they are hard, and often timid; but their air of
distinction, their interpretive qualities, have not often been
surpassed. In his Uffizi portraits of Eleanora di Toledo, of Prince
Ferdinand, of the Princess Maria, we seem to see the prototypes of
Velasquez' queens, princes, and princesses: and for a fine example of
dignified rendering of character, look in the Sala Baroccio of the
Uffizi at a bust of a young woman with a missal in her hand.


XIV.

[Page heading: MICHELANGELO]

The great Florentine artists, as we have seen, were, with scarcely an
exception, bent upon rendering the material significance of visible
things. This, little though they may have formulated it, was the
conscious aim of most of them; and in proportion as they emancipated
themselves from ecclesiastical dominion, and found among their employers
men capable of understanding them, their aim became more and more