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| Alessandro Allori Portrait of a Young Man ca. 1560 oil on panel Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Alessandro Allori Portrait of Bianca Cappello before 1587 tempera on plaster Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Alessandro Allori Allegorical Portrait of a Young Man in the guise of Mercury slaying Argus ca. 1575-80 oil on panel Harvard Art Museums |
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| Alessandro Allori St Jerome 1606 oil on panel Princeton University Art Museum |
In 1929 the great art historian Walter Friedlaender felt able to dismiss "Alessandro Allori, who flooded all Tuscany with his insipid pictures." The adopted ward and apprentice of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), Allori inherited a Florentine Renaissance style of scrupulous drawing and complex, elongated postures. Much of his subsequent career was devoted to Medici service – designing tapestries; painting portraits, cabinet miniatures, altarpieces; executing vast decorative schemes in fresco for villas and churches. Yet well before Allori's death in 1607, the "Mannerist" movement had begun to lose vigor and drift out of fashion. He has consequently been punished by many writers for the historical accident of his time and place, his awkward positioning between eras. Too little praise has been granted to his compensating strengths of design, construction, draftsmanship and sheer painterly craft.
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| Alessandro Allori Venus disarming Cupid (detail) ca. 1570 oil on canvas Musée Fabre, Montpellier |
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| Alessandro Allori Venus disarming Cupid ca. 1570 oil on canvas Musée Fabre, Montpellier |
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| Alessandro Allori Venus disarming Cupid ca. 1570 oil on panel Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Alessandro Allori Miracles of St Fiacre ca. 1596 oil on panel Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence |
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| Alessandro Allori Miracles of St Fiacre (detail) ca. 1596 oil on panel Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence |
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| Alessandro Allori Abduction of Proserpine 1570 oil on panel Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Alessandro Allori Hercules crowned by the Muses ca. 1568 oil on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Alessandro Allori Christ in the House of Martha and Mary 1605 oil on panel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Alessandro Allori Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery 1576-77 oil on panel Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence |
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| Alessandro Allori Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery 1576-77 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
The pair of duplicate paintings directly above serves as an additional demonstration of the distinction made at the end of the just-previous post on Massimo Stanzione – variations in national styles and standards of cleaning and conservation. The version of Allori's Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery that has spent the past couple of centuries in Russia still displays the Old Master dimness of old varnish (and old dirt). The version still housed in the Florentine church for which it was created probably looked much the same until the mid-20th century – when the Italians rather suddenly decided that their immense heritage of old paintings required a general brightening. As far as I am aware, no one has theorized that the abrupt demand for brighter more colorful museum paintings coincided with the mass dissemination of Technicolor movies and Kodachrome film.