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Andrea del Sarto [The Man] Men and Women,
1855, called “the faultless painter,” also Andrea senza Errori (Andrew the Unerring) was a great
painter of the Florentine School. His father was a tailor (sarto), so
the Italians, with their passion for nicknames, dubbed him “The Tailor’s
Andrew.” He was born in Gualfonda, Florence, in 1487. It is not certain
what was his real name: Vannuchi has been constantly given, but without
authority. He was at first put to work with a goldsmith, but he disliked
the business, and preferred drawing his master’s models. He was next
placed with a wood-carver and painter, one Gian Barill, with whom he
remained till 1498. He then went to the draughtsman and colourist, Piero
di Cosimo, under whom he studied the cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo. We next find him opening a shop in partnership with his
friend Francia Bigio, but the arrangement did not last long. The
brotherhood of the Servi employed Andrea from 1509 to 1514 in adorning
their church of the Annunziata at Florence. Mrs. Jameson, in her Legends
of the Monastic Orders, thus describes the church and cloisters
identified with the work of this painter at Florence: “Every one who has
been at Florence must remember the Church of the ‘Annunziata’; every one
who remembers that glorious church, who has lingered in the cloisters and
the cortile where Andrea del Sarto put forth all his power—where the
Madonna del Sacco and the Birth of the Virgin attest what he could
do and be as a painter—will feel interested in the Order of the
Servi. Among the extraordinary outbreaks of religious enthusiasm in the
thirteenth century, this was in its origin one of the most singular. Seven
Florentines, rich, noble, and in the prime of life, whom a similarity of
taste and feeling had drawn together, used to meet every day in a chapel
dedicated to the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin (then outside the
walls of Florence), there to sing the Ave or evening service in honour
of the Madonna, for whom they had an especial love and veneration. They
became known and remarked in their neighbourhood for those acts of piety,
so that the women and children used to point at them as they passed
through the streets and exclaim, Guardate i Servi di Maria (Behold the
Servants of the Virgin!) Hence the title afterwards assumed by the
Order.” These seven gentlemen at length forsook the world, sold all their
possessions and distributed their money to the poor, and retired to a
solitary spot in the mountains about six miles out of Florence; here they
built themselves huts of boughs and stones, and devoted themselves to the
service of the Virgin. It was for the cloisters of the church of the Servi
at Florence that Andrea del Sarto painted the Riposo. His Nativity of
the B.V. Mary is a grand fresco, the characters are noble and dignified,
and “draped in the magnificent taste which distinguished Andrea.” The
following account of the artist’s life is summarised from the article on
Del Sarto by Mr. W. M. Rossetti in the Encyc. Brit. He was an easy-going
plebeian, to whom a modest position in life and scanty gains were no
grievances. As an artist he must have known his own value; but he probably
rested content in the sense of his superlative powers as an executant, and
did not aspire to the rank of a great inventor or leader, for which,
indeed, he had no vocation. He led a social sort of life among his
compeers of the art. He fell in love with Lucrezia del Fede, wife of a
hatter named Carlo Recanati; the latter dying opportunely, the tailor’s
son married her on December 26th, 1512. She was a very handsome woman, and
has come down to us treated with great suavity in many a picture of her
lover-husband, who constantly painted her as a Madonna or otherwise; and
even in painting other women he made them resemble Lucrezia in general
type. Vasari, who was at one time a pupil of Andrea, describes her as
faithless, jealous, overbearing, and vixenish with the apprentices. She
lived to a great age, surviving her second husband forty years. Before the
end of 1516, a Pietà of his composition, and afterwards a Madonna, were
sent to the French Court. These were received with applause; and the
art-loving monarch Francis I. suggested in 1518 that Andrea should come to
Paris. He left his wife in Florence and went accordingly, and was very
cordially received, and moreover for the first time in his life handsomely
remunerated. His wife urged him to return to Italy. The king assented, on
the understanding that his absence was to be short; and he entrusted
Andrea with a sum of money to be expended in purchasing works of art for
the king. Andrea could not resist temptation, and spent the king’s money
and some of his own in building a house for himself in Florence. He fell
into disgrace with the king, but no serious punishment followed. In 1520
he resumed work in Florence, and painted many pictures for the cloisters
of Lo Scalzo. He dwelt in Florence throughout the memorable siege, which
was followed by an infectious pestilence. He caught the malady, struggled
against it with little or no tending from his wife, who held aloof, and
died, no one knowing much about it at the moment, on January 22nd, 1531,
at the early age of forty-three. He was buried unceremoniously in the
church of the Servi. Mr. Rossetti gives the following criticisms on his
work as an artist. “Andrea had true pictorial style, a very high standard
of correctness, and an enviable balance of executive endowments. The point
of technique in which he excelled least was perhaps that of discriminating
the varying textures of different objects and surfaces. There is not much
elevation or ideality in his works—much more of reality.” He lacked
invention notwithstanding his great technical skill. He had no inward
impulse toward the high and noble; he was a man without fervour, and had
no enthusiasm for the true and good. It is said that Michelangelo once
remarked that if he had attempted greater things he might have rivalled
Rafael, but Andrea was not a man for the mountain-top—the plains sufficed
for him.
[The Poem.] On the bare historical facts, as recorded by Vasari in his
life of Andrea del Sarto, Mr. Browning has framed this wonderful art-poem.
He has taken Vasari’s “notes” and framed “not another sound but a star,”
as he says in his Abt Vogler. Given the Vasari life, he has mixed it
with his thought, and has transfigured it so that the sad, infinitely
pathetic soul, in its stunted growth and wasted form, lives before us in
Mr. Browning’s lines. As Abt Vogler is his greatest music-poem, so this
is his greatest art-poem, and both are unique. No poet has ever given us
such utterances on music and painting as we possess in these works: if all
the poet’s work were to perish save these, they would suffice to insure
immortality for their author. It is said that the poem was suggested by a
picture in the Pitti Palace at Florence. “Faultless but soulless” is the
verdict of art critics on Andrea’s works. Why is this? Mr. Browning’s poem
tells us in no hesitating phrase that the secret lay in the fact that
Andrea was an immoral man, an infatuated man, passionately demanding love
from a woman who had neither heart nor intellect, a wife for whom he
sacrificed his soul and the highest interests of his art. He knew and
loved Lucrezia while she was another man’s wife; he was content that she
should also love other men when she was his. He robbed King Francis, his
generous patron, that he might give the money to his unworthy spouse. He
neglected his parents in their poverty and old age. Is there not in these
facts the secret of his failure? To Mr. Browning there is, and his poem
tells us why. But, it will be objected, many great geniuses have been
immoral men. This is so, but we cannot argue the point here; the poet’s
purpose is to show how in this particular case the evil seed bore fruit
after its kind. The poem opens with the artist’s attempts to bribe his
wife by money to accord him a little semblance of love: he promises to
paint that he may win gold for her. The keynote of the poem is struck in
these opening words. It is evening, and Andrea is weary with his work, but
never weary of praising Lucrezia’s beauty; sadly he owns that he is at
best only a shareholder in his wife’s affections, that even her pride in
him is gone, that she neither understands nor cares to understand his art.
He tells her that he can do easily and perfectly what at the bottom of his
heart he wishes for, deep as that might be; he could do what others
agonise to do all their lives and fail in doing, yet he knows for all that
there burns a truer light of God in them than in him. Their works drop
groundward, though their souls have glimpses of heaven that are denied to
him. He could have beaten Rafael had he possessed Rafael’s soul; for the
Urbinate’s technical skill, as he half hesitatingly shows, is inferior to
his own; and had his Lucrezia urged him, inspired him, to claim a seat by
the side of Michelangelo and Rafael, he might for her sake have done it.
He sees he is but a half-man working in an atmosphere of silver-grey. He
had his chance at Fontainebleau; there he sometimes seemed to leave the
ground, but he had a chain which dragged him down. Lucrezia called him.
Not only for her did he forsake the higher art ambitions, but the common
ground of honesty; he descended to cement his walls with the gold of King
Francis which he had stolen, and for her. From dishonesty to connivance at
his wife’s infidelity is an easy step; and so, while in the act of
expressing his remorse at his ingratitude to the king, we find him asking
Lucrezia quite naturally, as a matter of ordinary occurrence—
“Must you go?
That cousin here again? he waits outside?
Must see you—you, and not with me?”
Here we discover the secret of the soullessness: the fellow has the tailor
in his blood, even though the artist is supreme at the fingers’ ends. He
is but the craftsman after all. Think of Fra Angelico painting his saints
and angels on his knees, straining his eyes to catch the faintest glimpse
of the heavenly radiance of Our Lady’s purity and holiness, feeling that
he failed, too dazzled by the brightness of Divine light, to catch more
than its shadow, and we shall know why there is soul in the great
Dominican painter, and why there is none in the Sarto. Lucrezia,
despicable as she was, was not the cause of her husband’s failure. His
marriage, his treatment of Francis, his allowing his parents to starve, to
die of want, while he paid gaming debts for his wife’s lover,—all these
things tell us what the man was. No woman ruined his soul; he had no soul
to ruin!
Notes.—Fiesole, a small but famous episcopal city of Italy, on the
crown of a hill above the Arno, about three miles to the west of Florence.
Morello, a mountain of the Apennines. The Urbinate: Rafael was born at
Urbino. George Vasari, painter and author of the “Lives of the Most
Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects.” Rafael, Raphael
Sanzio of Urbino. Agnolo: Michel Agnolo is the more correct form of
Michael Angelo. Francis, King Francis I. of France, the royal patron of
Andrea. Fontainebleau, a town of France 37 miles S.E. of Paris; its
palace is one of the most sumptuous in France. “The Roman’s is the better
when you pray.” Catholics, however, do not use the works of the great
masters for devotional purposes nearly so much as might be supposed. No
“miraculous” picture is by this class. Cue-owls: The Scops Owl: Scops
Giú (Scopoli). Its cry is a ringing “ki-ou”—whence Italian “chiù” or
“ciù.” “Walls in the New Jerusalem.” Revelation xxi. 15-17. Leonard,
Leonardo da Vinci.
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