16th-Century Follower of Agnolo Bronzino

With Christie's, circa 1972;
Thereafter acquired by the present owner.

This mid-sixteenth-century work is based on a painting produced by Bronzino for the Florentine banker Bartolomeo Bettini. According to Giorgio Vasari, in the 1530s Bronzino executed three lunettes depicting Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, almost a Tuscan literary trinity. In Bettini's original camera, or bedchamber, the poetic portraits accompanied a Venus and Cupid painted by Jacopo Pontormo and based on designs by Michelangelo (Florence, Galleria dell'Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 1570).