Pietà

This painting represents Bronzino’s early style. It is a closed composition of sculptural masses. Linear contours, sometimes precisely drawn in Quattrocento style, isolate features, anatomical details, and drapery folds. Even the distant landscape - a rare feature in Bronzino’s art - looks Quattrocentesque in the stylisation of trees and hills. Calvary at the left and a small wood at the right anchor the arc of the horizon, locking it to the upper corners of the frame; in the lower corners Christ, his limbs stiffened in rigor mortis, fits into the left, and the Magdalen into the right.