Restoration has been completed on a portrait of 16th-century poet Laura Battiferri painted by Agnolo Bronzino. The painting, which is kept in the Palazzo Vecchio, is about to go on loan to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Portrait upon restoration
The painting was restored over a period of five months by the Officina del Restauro, working under the aegis of the City of Florence and the Fine Arts Department of Florence, Pistoia and Prato. The restoration was funded in part by the Friends of Florence non-profit organization. The artwork will appear at the forthcoming exhibition The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570, which is due to open on June 26, 2021.
Detail from the restoration
Laura Battiferri was a poet from Urbino, Marche. She published two books of poetry in her lifetime, in a century which saw a number of Italian women poets achieve fame and success. Her second husband was Bartolomeo Ammannati, the architect behind Florence’s Ponte Santa Trinita. She spent much of her young adult life in Rome, but in the mid-1550s reluctantly moved to Florence for the sake of her husband’s career. Agnolo Bronzino, on the other hand, was a Florentine painter from the High Renaissance/Mannerist period. His most famous work is probably the lurid, enigmatic Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, which is on display at London’s National Gallery. He enjoyed a literary correspondence with Battiferri, with whom he exchanged sonnets.
