WTDTW-22

I can think of few better places to while away the winter hours than at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and its glorious "The Drawings of Bronzino" show (through April 18). There you'll encounter — no doubt for the very first time — an artist who was in many ways the equal of Michelangelo in talent if not in fame today.

Angolo di Cosimo Toro, known as Bronzino, was born to a butcher near Florence in 1503 and apprenticed to the elegant painter Jacopo Pontormo. Bronzino grew up to become a distinguished poet as well as court painter to Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and his first wife, Eleonora di Toledo — the latter being immortalized in all her brocaded splendor, along with her young son Giovanni I, in one of the artist's best-known canvases.

Bronzino combined the delicacy of his master's gifts with the sculptural genius of Michelangelo. But as this first-ever Bronzino show demonstrates — there will be an exhibit of his paintings in Florence this fall — the Mannerist artist also possessed a balletic grace that was all his own. This is encapsulated by the sublime "Joseph With Jacob and His Brothers," a fragment of the modello, or demonstration piece, for the tapestry "Joseph Recounting His Dream of the Sun, Moon and Stars" (circa 1546-48), on loan from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

The central figure is, of course, Joseph, the beautiful dreamer of the Bible, whose pride, privilege, talent and obliviousness inspire his brothers to jealous treachery. Here Bronzino gives Joseph a treatment worthy of the lust that inflamed the heart of Potiphar's wife. His knotted tunic is as ornamental as his twisting tresses, his profile is exquisitely elongated and his heavenward gesture accentuates his sinewy tenderness.

He is indeed the sun around which revolve the elderly, doting patriarch Jacob, who hangs on his son's every word; baby bro Benjamin, portrayed as a yearning youth; and their older siblings, whose faces are coarsened by murderous hate.

Bronzino has arranged the composition in such a way that the figures are not only thrown into sculptural relief. They become dancers in a ballet that is a complex family drama. It's as if Bronzino has transcended the preparatory stage of draftsmanship and even tapestry itself — the drawing here and elsewhere is superior to the finished product in any event — to foreshadow ballet choreography or opera direction.

You'll find Bronzino's divinely dynamic gifts also expressed in the modello for "The Resurrection" (circa 1548-52), which presents us with a Jesus who is at once gentle and heroic; and the modello for the Frescoed Vault of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo (circa 1540), which gives us a rippling, sensuous St. Michael. These and other works are wonderfully reproduced on heavy, cream-colored paper in the accompanying catalog, edited by the estimable Carmen C. Bambach, who curated the show with Janet Cox-Rearick and George R. Goldner.

Sometimes Bronzino's rarefied skill goes too far, though, as in the reproduction of his fresco "The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" (1565-69). St. Lawrence was martyred on a grill. Here, however, he looks like nothing so much as a splendidly unruffled young man about to stretch out on a tanning bed. 212-535-7710, www.metmuseum.org