The son of a butcher, Agnolo di Cosimo Mariano di Tori, better known by his nickname Agnolo Bronzino, was born on November 17, 1503, in Monticelli, then a suburb of Florence. From 1515 to 1518 he was apprenticed to the painter Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557), and by the early 1520s he had gained some independence as a collaborator in the elder master's workshop. The friendship and professional association between Pontormo and Bronzino, who were relatively close in age, continued for almost four decades.

Pontormo's impact on Bronzino lasted into the early 1530s, when the work of both painters demonstrates a reciprocal flow of ideas and vocabulary. Pontormo's influence on the young Bronzino's drawings is clearly evident in the frequent choice of red chalk as a medium; the attention to figure studies from life; the use of strong, broken-up outlines; and the softly blended interior modeling. Most important, Pontormo and Bronzino considered drawing to be a functional activity, done to prepare the design of final works; unlike some artists of their generation they did not produce drawings as autonomous finished works.

Even Bronzino's most Pontormesque early drawings reveal the young artist's style in the more careful articulation of contour (with few, if any, reinforcement lines) and more tightly defined modeling. Nevertheless, in some instances it is not possible to arrive at a definitive attribution to one artist or the other, given their lifelong association as well as the Renaissance workshop practice of learning by precisely copying the drawings of the teacher.