A significant portrait by Bronzino: the dwarf Braccio di Bartolo, known as Morgante

by Federico Giannini (Instagram: @federicogiannini1), published on 07/12/2015
Categories: Works and artists / Disclaimer

He then portrayed Bronzino to Duke Cosimo Morgante naked dwarf all whole, et in two ways, that is, on one side of the painting the front and on the other the back, with that extravagance of monstrous limbs that dwarf has, which painting in that genre is beautiful and marvelous. This is how Giorgio Vasari described, in the 1568 edition of his Lives, one of the most famous paintings by Bronzino (1503 - 1572), the one depicting Braccio di Bartolo, the dwarf of the court of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici: originally from Castel del Rio, a village in the Apennines of Bologna, he held the role of jester and jester (a typical role for court dwarfs at the time) and was cynically nicknamed Morgante, like the giant in Luigi Pulci’s well-known poem. This is the same character that Valerio Cioli used as a model for the celebrated Bacchino fountain that adorns the Boboli Gardens in Florence.

Valerio Cioli, Fountain of the Bacchus (1560; white marble, height 116 cm; Florence, Boboli Gardens)

The work is mentioned for the first time in the first inventory of the Medici Guardaroba, which was compiled in 1553: we do not know the exact date of its completion, but we can date the canvas to around the same period in which the inventory was compiled (we can go as far back as the late 1540s). It is a painting that easily attracts the attention of visitors to the Uffizi, the museum where it is now kept, not only because of its unusual subject, a court dwarf, but also because the work is painted on both sides, and shows us Braccio di Bartolo totally nude, as Vasari also recalls, although Bronzino has strategically placed a butterfly fluttering in front of the dwarf’s pudenda in order to remove them from the viewer’s gaze. The figure is seen both from the front and, on the back side, from behind. On the recto, i.e., the front side, we also see, in the upper right corner, a jay, a bird that is particularly common in our woods: the dwarf is in fact hunting, one of his passions, which he used to practice in the Medici reserves, particularly in the gardens of the Villa di Castello (Braccio di Bartol had to lend himself, as well as the other court dwarfs, to being mocked and scoffed at, but all in all he could lead a comfortable life at the Medici court). The owl that the dwarf holds on his right hand, and which is secured to a small rope tied to his left hand, is functional for this activity: the bird of prey was employed, at night, in a special hunting technique for the purpose of attracting prey. The verso, that is, the back side of the work, in fact returns us the dwarf with the owl on his shoulder and with the jay, captured, in his hand. The fact that Braccio di Bartolo was familiar with these practices also appears from a letter of 1544, in which he speaks of an evening spent by Cosimo I in his garden, “where the Dwarf [...] havendo mettere li appresso la sua civetta ha preso sei o otto uccellini con piacer di Sua Excellenza.”

Bronzino (Angelo Tori), Portrait of the Dwarf Braccio di Bartolo, called Morgante (before 1553; oil on canvas, 149 x 98 cm; Florence, Uffizi), recto and verso

Such an unusual realization must necessarily have had a purpose: to give a plausible explanation tried, in 1956, the American art historian James Holderbaum, who in an article published that year in Burlington Magazine traced the painting back to the so-called Paragone delle arti, a dispute initiated in 1546 by the man of letters Benedetto Varchi (1503 - 1565), who wanted to involve the major artists of Florence at the time in order to ask them which was the more illustrious art, painting or sculpture. The artists responded by stating their reasons in letters addressed to Benedetto Varchi, and Bronzino argued in favor of painting. Holderbaum believed that Bronzino made the painting within the framework of this dispute, in order to demonstrate the superiority of painting, which, unlike sculpture, would give the artist a way to depict the passage of time: if the front side of the painting depicts the initial moment of the hunt, the back side depicts the end, with the captured prey. This is precisely the meaning that critics today tend to attribute to Bronzino’s work.

The painting then introduces further food for thought. Bronzino’s exceptional descriptive ability, which made him one of the most skilled (but also one of the coldest) portraitists in the entire history of art, and the extraordinary naturalness with which he used to portray his subjects, led many commentators, especially ancient ones, to lavish bizarre celebrations of the work, based on the contrast between the painter’s skill and the feelings of repulsion that the subject aroused in those who observed it. One example is Vasari himself, who appreciates that Bronzino succeeded in a “beautiful and marvelous” painting despite the “extravagance of monstrous limbs” of the dwarf. And again the erudite Domenico Maria Manni, in his Veglie piacevoli (Pleasant Vigils ) of 1759, argued that Cosimo I wanted Braccio di Bartolo to be portrayed “so that the monstrosity all of him might remain visible to the eye of posterity as a marvelous thing.” Today such considerations would be considered ethically unacceptable, but in eras when dwarves fell squarely into the category of “deformed” and “monstrous,” Bronzino’s painting was seen as a demonstration of skill and of painting’s ability to render even subjects capable of provoking revulsion. All this was in line with the artistic trends of the time: artistic debates on the grotesque and the monstrous were spreading (the writings of the Portuguese painter Francisco de Hollanda, in particular, are worth mentioning), and there were not a few artists who had tried their hand at the theme (think of the sculptures in the Monster Park of Bomarzo, or the engravings of Federico Zuccari).

In 2010, on the occasion of the major Bronzino exhibition held at Palazzo Strozzi, the painting of the dwarf Morgante underwent a demanding restoration, one of the most important in recent years: in fact, the work had been heavily altered during the nineteenth century, when it was located at the Medici villa of Poggio Imperiale, because Braccio di Bartolo had been transformed into the god Bacchus. In other words, the owl had been replaced with a goblet of wine, the head of the dwarf had been crowned with a vine leaf, and likewise a sort of loincloth, also made of grapes and vine leaves, was added to the figure of the dwarf.

The painting before restoration, with 19th-century remakes

The restoration, in addition to integrating the color falls and repairing the cuts and tears that it had suffered over the centuries, totally eliminated the nineteenth-century additions, giving us back the original image as it was intended by Bronzino: after the exhibition, with the opening of the new rooms of the Uffizi, the then director Antonio Natali wanted to place the painting in the center of room 64, one of the two dedicated to Bronzino. So, Braccio di Bartolo now occupies a central role within one of the world’s major museums: with our modern sensibilities, we can think that, despite the mockery the dwarf had to endure during his lifetime, his fame has transcended the centuries and Braccio is now the undisputed protagonist of a painting of immeasurable skill and profound allegorical significance in the context of an illustrious dispute between artists and literati. Qualities that make it one of the most important works of the sixteenth century.

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