Andrea del Sarto

Italian painter

• Born: July 16, 1486
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: September 28, 1530
• Place of death: Florence (now in Italy)

Andrea del Sarto is one of the most important Florentine painters of the early sixteenth century. His work was clearly inspired by the classical ideals of the central Italian High Renaissance, particularly by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, but his pupils were to become the creators of the anticlassical style later known as mannerism.

Early Life

Andrea del Sarto (ahn-DRAY-ah dehl-SAHR-to), the son of Agnolo di Francesco Lanfranchi and Constanza, was born Andrea d’Agnolo in Florence, probably one of twins, for the surviving documents indicate that Agnolo di Francesco’s two sons, Andrea and Domenico, were both baptized on July 17, 1486, the day after their birth.

Andrea’s great-grandfather had been an agricultural laborer, his grandfather a linen weaver, and his father a tailor (un sarto), and for that reason Andrea was given the nickname of Andrea del Sarto.

Andrea left school at the age of seven to work for a goldsmith before beginning his training as a painter, first in the studio of the little-known Andrea di Salvi Barile and later with Piero di Cosimo. It has also been persuasively argued by modern critics that Andrea must have studied with the technically accomplished Raffaellino del Garbo, or at least been strongly influenced by his work.

On December 11, 1508, Andrea was matriculated in the guild of Florentine painters. About two years earlier, he had entered into a partnership with Francesco di Cristoforo Bigi, known as Franciabigio. The two artists shared a studio and were later joined by the young sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, who had come from Rome.

Life’s Work

Two fresco cycles in Florence are the major works of the collaboration of Andrea and Franciabigio. In the forecourt of the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, they continued the fresco cycle begun in the fifteenth century that illustrated the life of Saint Filippo Benizzi and scenes from the life of the Virgin. The scenes from the life of Saint Filippo Benizzi, the chief saint of the Servite Order (of which the Santissima Annunziata is the mother church), were Andrea’s first fresco commissions and show him experimenting with a variety of compositions. Two of the scenes are loosely organized and recall the pictorial ideals of the preceding century, but in the Saint Curing the Possessed Woman , The Death of the Saint , and the Miracles Performed by the Relics of the Saint , dated 1510, Andrea introduced rigidly organized, symmetrical compositions that reveal his debt to Leonardo da Vinci, while his handling of color, light, and shade shows how much he admired the work of Raphael. The finest work in this cycle is the last one that Andrea painted, the Birth of the Virgin (1514). In this remarkable work, which marks the beginning of his artistic maturity, the severity of the earlier scenes has given way to a more flexible and subtly harmonious type of composition. One can see in this work how completely Andrea had absorbed the pictorial ideals of the High Renaissance.

The two artists also collaborated in a commission they received from the Florentine Compagnia dello Scalzo, a secular confraternity. The oratory of the compagnia was located not far from the Church of San Marco, and the frescoes by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio, which are still extant, are in what was once the cloister. The subjects are scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist and the Cardinal Virtues. These frescoes are executed in girisaille, that is, in varying shades of gray. Although they were probably begun as early as 1511, Andrea continued to work on them from time to time until 1526. Ten of the scenes are by Andrea, who also painted The Cardinal Virtues , while two are by Franciabigio. The Scalzo frescoes are among the finest examples of the High Renaissance style in Florence. Each scene is elegantly composed, but with a naturalism of attitude and gesture that makes it completely plausible, a reality that is convincing but one that has become a realm of grace and beauty.

While he was working on these commissions, Andrea also had a hand in the preparation of the civic decorations in celebration of the return of the Medici family from their exile (February, 1513) and for the ceremonial entrance of the Medici pope Leo X into Florence in 1515. In 1517, he completed one of his most impressive paintings, the Madonna of the Harpies . In this, the characteristic elegance of composition and pose is enriched by startling innovations in color, intermittent passages of light and shadow, and a softness of modeling that create a richly atmospheric effect.

The work at the cloister of the Scalzo was interrupted by Andrea’s departure from Florence to enter the service of Francis I of France. He accepted the invitation to go to Fontainbleau in the late spring or early summer of 1516 and remained there until 1519. Only a few paintings can be identified as having been painted in France, but one of these, the Charity (signed and dated 1518), is a masterpiece, one of his most completely realized works. Like the Madonna of the Harpies, it fuses the discipline of classical composition with a richly pictorial palette. The Charity, however, is enriched by a beautifully painted landscape background in which the idealistic transformation of nature echoes the visionary grace of the figures.

Andrea probably returned to Florence because he did not want to remain separated from his wife, Lucrezia del Fede, whom he had married shortly after her husband died in 1516. She was about four years younger than Andrea and, at the time of their marriage, was already the mother of a small child. Andrea’s biographer Giorgio Vasari states that the French king gave him money to purchase paintings and sculptures for the royal collection after Andrea had solemnly promised that he would come back to France within a few months. Instead, he remained in Florence. While Vasari’s account has been doubted, it is known that Andrea arrived in Florence with a large sum of money and that in October, 1520, he bought a plot of land on which he later built a large house and studio. He visited Rome about 1520 and in 1523 left Florence because of an outbreak of the plague. He went to the Mugello, north of Florence, where he worked for the nuns of San Piero a Luco for about a year before he returned to his native city. In November of 1524, he was back in Florence; very little is known about his activities from this point until his death in 1530 at the age of forty-four.

Andrea continued to work in the Scalzo until 1526 and produced a number of altarpieces for churches in and around Florence. The Madonna and Child with Saints of 1525-1526 is typical of his work during this period, with its soft modeling, strong color harmonies, and strong, simple grouping. Paintings such as this one made a great impression on the younger painters in Florence. Two artists who had studied with Andrea earlier, Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo and Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, called Rosso Fiorentino, had by this time evolved their striking anticlassical or early mannerist styles, but between 1520 and 1530 a new generation of painters turned to Andrea for inspiration. He strongly influenced the subsequent development of Florentine painting.

One of the finest of his late works is The Last Supper in the refectory of the former convent of San Salvi in Florence (1526-1527), a work of great pictorial interest that comes close to the dramatic intensity of Leonardo da Vinci’s rendering of the subject. The Madonna del Sacco of 1525 in the Chiostro dei Morti of the Santissima Annunziata is another impressive example of his mature style, which shows the lack of emotional content seen in many of his last works.

Significance

Andrea was an artist of great virtuosity. His surviving drawings, most of which are studies from life, are superb examples of draftmanship. He is equally skillful as a colorist and as a composer. He was also proficient at fresco painting and panel painting. Modern critics have noted that his work not only directly inspired a number of younger artists but also laid the foundations for some of the most exciting developments of Italian art during the seventeenth century. For Vasari, however, Andrea was an artist whose work was flawed because he lacked the moral strength to make the exertions required to achieve the highest results. There is a certain justice to this criticism, particularly in Andrea’s late works, many of which are interesting for the virtuosity of their pictorial effects but are lacking in strong emotional content.

His frescoes in the Scalzo and the Santissima Annunziata, however, are some of the finest achievements of Florentine art. It is to Andrea’s credit that while many of his contemporaries were able to imitate certain aspects of the style of Leonardo and Raphael, he was one of the few who were able to assimilate their styles without losing individuality.

Bibliography

Borsook, Eve. The Mural Painters of Tuscany: From Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto. 2d ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1980. A detailed analysis of Andrea del Sarto’s frescoes in the oratory of the Compagnia dello Scalzo in Florence. Includes much information on the relationship of the murals to the site and on the technique.

Cheney, Liana de Girolami, ed. Readings in Italian Mannerism. New York: P. Lang, 1997. Anthology of essays by major art historians and Andrea del Sarto scholars, including Sydney J. Freedberg, John Shearman, and Ernst Gombrich. Looks at both the history and the historiography of mannerism in art. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Freedberg, Sydney J. Andrea del Sarto. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. A comprehensive study of all aspects of the artist’s career. This book and one by John Shearman are the standard monographs on the artist. While Freedberg traces Andrea’s development within the context of the classical style of the High Renaissance, Shearman shows the importance of Andrea’s work, particularly his use of color, for subsequent developments in Italian art of the seventeenth century.

McKillop, Susan Regan. Franciabigio. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. The author publishes a number of new documents and includes a careful evaluation of the collaboration between Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio.

Natali, Antonio. Andrea del Sarto. Translated by Jeffrey Jennings. New York: Abbeville Press, 1999. An important reinterpretation of Andrea del Sarto by a director of one of Italy’s most famous museums, the Uffizi Gallery. Looks closely at both the artist’s work and his environment to argue that his career was based on a rigorous commitment to humility in style, reinforced by a circle with similar values. Many color illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Neufeld, Gunther. “On the Genesis of the Madonna del Sacco.” The Art Bulletin 47 (1965): 117-118. A study of the preparatory drawings for Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna del Sacco (1525) in the Cloister of the Santissima Annunziata, Florence, and its derivation from a work by the Venetian artist Titian.

O’Gorman, James F. “An Interpretation of Andrea del Sarto, Borgheriri Holy Family.” The Art Bulletin 48 (1965): 502-504. A study of the religious significance of Andrea del Sarto’s painting of Mary, Joseph, the Christ Child, and Young Saint John the Baptist and its relationship to Florentine religious and political ideals of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Shearman, John. Andrea del Sarto. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. One of the two standard monographs on the artist.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Vol. 3. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere. Reprint. New York: Abrams, 1979. The standard translation of the second edition (1568) of the only contemporary biography of the artist. Although Vasari was only nineteen when Andrea died, he had access to reliable information about the artist when he was preparing his biography.