Bronzino was court painter to the Medici, and Bandini (1504–1592) a prominent banker from a Florentine family. The artist’s reserved and elegant portraits define their era; he emphasized his sitters’ public masks, and with his poised, carefully calculated paintings, he gave perfect expression to the artificiality of the elite’s social code. The fragmentary “Modest Venus” statuette evokes Bandini’s collection of antiquities, but the juxtaposition of flesh and stone, both impossibly refined, is also charged. Frame: carved wood, gilded. Italy, second-half 16th century
