English: Bronzino’s portraits are undoubtedly among his most important works. His most significant examples date from the 1540s onwards, but it was in the 1530s that he began to formulate their prototype. This involved a distant presentation of the sitter, a sense of immutability, and an elegant, stylised appearance. These concepts are already evident in portraits such as the Young Man with a Book of the early 1530s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Portrait of Ugolino Martelli of the end of that decade (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). Bronzino created a gallery of images of the intellectual society of his day, painting musicians, poets and writers as well as members of the Florentine aristocracy.