Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist c. 1540

Agnolo Bronzino, who lived from 1503 to 1572, painted this ‘Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist’. It reflects the sophisticated artifice of the Florentine court. Bronzino worked for the Medici, who were patrons of the arts and the effective rulers of Florence, and who also influenced the imagery in the painting. The Virgin is elegant, with the fashionable pale skin and refined features of the time. The children are oddly adult-like and poised, and the globe is there to reference the power of the Medici family. Religious paintings in 16th-century Florence were often bound up with these kinds of political and social considerations. To understand this work better, we can look at court records of the Medici family and consider the writings of other artists and intellectuals of the time. In doing so, we get a clearer picture of the complex social dynamics that gave rise to such images.