PERHAPS I should not have decided to write about the rediscovered Bronzino portrait that Sotheby’s will offer in New York on January 26 (Fig 1). The 30½in by 21½in half-length painting of a man with a quill and a sheet of paper could be the personification of writer’s block. That seems to be implied by the Latin lines he has managed to get down, which translate as:
The image thinks to write but in fact it does not write It writes of its own accord, but it does not act of its own accord Therefore, it does so unwillingly and writesIt intends, further, to write, so that it is not necessary…