The Drawings of Bronzino The Metropolitan Museum of Art" …by drawing I mean all those things that can be formed with the value, or force, of simple lines. " Agnolo Bronzino Although many unique events occur at any given time in the New York art world, few represent true advancement in scholarship and major historical significance while offering a once in a lifetime aesthetic experience. Such was the case in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of all known drawings by or attributed to the 16 th century Mannerist master Angnolo Bronzino. Mannerism, derived from the Italian maniera, or style, as the term was used by Bronzino's contemporary, the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, is one of the first examples in Western " art about art. " The Mannerist artist expects an audience to understand the visual clues and the indirect quotations found in their work. Delighting in artificiality, Mannerism is style at its most thoughtful, fully self-conscious of its rule breaking and its deliberate exaggeration of classical canons. When used in the service of transcendence of the real, Mannerism concentrates on an almost complete rejection of the ideals of nature itself. As Stanley Freeber wrote in Observations on the Painting of the Maniera, it's " art imitating art, rather than an art imitating nature ". With this in mind, we can begin to approach this prodigious and confounding exhibition. Organized in collaboration with the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi and the Polo Museale Fiorentino, The Drawings of Bronzino presents approximately sixty works on paper. From his student work in imitation of his master Jacopo da Pontormo, to the drawings for the frescoes and altarpiece of the private chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, to later works such as the Story of Joseph tapestries and the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence fresco, the exhibit was arranged chronologically over three rooms, methodically dividing Bronzino's output and allowing his extant graphic style to gracefully unfold. Born 1503 in Monticelli, outside of Florence, Angnolo Bronzino spent most of his life in that city, dying there in 1572. Court artist to Cosimo de'Medici, know poet and member of the Florentine literary academy, he was, as well, one of the founders of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, the first art academy in Europe. As a teenager Bronzino entered into the workshop of Pontormo and was producing work under his own signature by 1528. Unlike Raphael, who left many completed works on paper, both Pontormo and Bronzino left few " finished " drawings. From the extant corpus, we can only surmise Bronzino's actual