Bronzino Beauties

I love the portraits of Bronzino. He lived his whole life in Florence (1503-1572) and was mainly the court painter for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who happened to be a very powerful Medici, so there are many Bronzino portraits of the Medici family scattered throughout museums around the world. I particularly like his portraits of women. They are so finely done, rich and detailed and studying the faces of these ladies, I can really see their personalities come through the paint. And the jewelry.....holy 24 karats, Batgirl!
Let's just say Bronzino had embellishing down to, well , a fine art. (see what I did there?)

Here's how I started out....
I began with my usual routine of giving everything a good coat of gesso. Sigh....I do love gesso.
I wanted the Triptych-Tower Top to stand out in contrast with the color I was planning on using, so I painted everything that was going to show, black.

I began playing with the layouts of the ladies, moving things around to the spaces I felt they looked best, keeping in mind that there were going to be a bunch of contrasting watercolor flowers behind them.

I also connected the back pieces together using my favorite linen hinging tape and painted it black.

I painted the back completely black after the front dried.

After fussing around with composition some more, I decided that the black background was a bit too heavy and needed some relief, so I painted the top part of the black background gold where the pierced top of the towers show through.

After gluing down my cut-out images of the ladies and flowers to the back side of the front frame, I then glued the whole shebang on to the corresponding backs. I piled some weight on the piece to make sure they dried flat.

 I 'beefed up' the jewelry the ladies are wearing by using Liquid pearls and adding flat back crystals. Then I painted some gold detailing around each frame, added some metal embellishments and gave it a good few hours to dry well before I touched up any gold paint. I also made sure that there were no bits of white peeking out of the side of the piece and touched up the black where I need to.

SUPPLIES:
Triptych-Tower Top


Additional supplies:
Acrylic paint
Gesso
Liquid Pearls
Bronzini Portraits
Floral collage sheets
Metals embellishments
Linen Hinging tape
Crystals

Thank you for stopping by!