Page:Biographical catalogue of the principal Italian painters.djvu/192

SARTO. 161 In the following year, however, leaving his scholar, Andrea returned to Flo- rence to fetch his wife, and Francis entrusted him with a considerahle sum of money to purchase works of art with. Whether from a want of prin- ciple on his own part, or through the inducement of his wife, a celebrated beauty, of indi^erent character, and with whom he was not happy, Andrea squandered the King's money and never returned to France. The pictures of Andrea are generally characterised by a simple cheerfulness, and indicate little of that resigned sen- timent which constituted the chief ele- ment of the style of some of his im- mediate predecessors. The expression of his female heads is natural and graceful, of a purely individual cha- racter, his wife, Lucrezia di Baccio del Fede (a widow), being his model on most occasions. Yasari complains of her iU treatment of Andrea's scho- lars; he was himself one. Andrea's draperies are ample and flowing, and he displays great softness and de- licacy in the modelling of his forms ; his colouring is powerful, and many of his pictures are enriched with land- scape backgrounds. Those executed by him at a later period are of unequal merit, and not free from mannerism. He copied and imitated the works of other great masters with an extraordi- nary accuracy; Yasari relates, as an instance, that Giulio Romano, who had assisted Raphael in painting the Por- trait of Leo X. and the two Cardinals, when showing, at Mantua, the copy of this work made by Andrea, pointed it out with pride as the original picture ; and he showed Yasari, in proof, "the very touches of the pencil that he him- self had made," and could not be convinced that he was looking at a copy until Yasari pointed out to him the private mark (the name) of An- drea del Sarto behind the picture. Giulio observed that he did not admire the picture the less ; he thought it a more interesting work, as showing that one great master could so perfectly imitate another. Andrea was one of the most cele- brated of the Italian painters of the best period of the sixteenth century, but is better known for his oil paint- ings (especially his Holy Families) than his frescoes; though the five large frescoes representing the History of San Filippo Benizi, the founder of the order in the smaller court of the convent of the Servi, the Santissima Annunziata, at Florence, are among his finest works, they were executed almost gratuitously in 1500-10. He seems to have received remarkably little for all his works, except when at the Court of Francis; those of the Annunziata, however, are among his earliest, and yet they acquired him the name of Andrea senza errori. Another very celebrated composition, his best fresco, is the Holy Family in Repose, known as the " Madonna del Sacco " (from the circumstance of Jo- seph leaning against a sack in it), in the great court of the same convent, in the lunette over the entrance, painted in 1625. The Last Supper, in the refectory of the old monastery of San Salvi, near Florence, is also one of Andrea's master-pieces, for colour, form, and character. Andrea was such a master of fresco, that he obviated the necessity of re- touching when dry, which gives his works the appearance of having been finished in a day. His easel pictures are numerous, but are chiefly Holy Families. An Annunciation in the Pitti Palace displays more sentiment than is usual in his works, and is some- what in the style of Francia: and an altar-piece, in the same palace, called the Disputa della Santissima Trinita, exhibits more the sensuous develop.