Andrea del Sarto

Andrea del Sarto (born July 16, 1486, Florence [Italy]—died before Sept. 29, 1530, Florence) was an Italian painter and draftsman whose works of exquisite composition and craftsmanship were instrumental in the development of Florentine Mannerism. His most striking among other well-known works is the series of frescoes on the life of St. John the Baptist in the Chiostro dello Scalzo (c. 1515–26).

Sarto’s family name was probably Lanfranchi, and his father was a tailor (hence “del Sarto”; Italian sarto, “tailor”). Little of real interest is known about his life, probably because it was for the most part uneventful. He was notably short in stature and known to his friends as Andreino. With two brief exceptions, his working life was spent in Florence. He was a pupil of Piero di Cosimo and was greatly influenced by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Fra’ Bartolommeo. Andrea del Sarto’s art, rooted in traditional Quattrocento (15th-century) painting, combined Leonardo’s sfumato with Raphael’s compositional harmony in a style that was typical of the Cinquecento (16th century). He began to produce independent work about 1506—not precociously. Almost immediately he began a long association with the church and convent of SS. Annunziata (for which he executed frescoes in 1509–14 [in the Chiostro dei Voti] and 1525 [in the Chiostro Grande]), and he moved to a workshop near it in or about 1511. There, for five or six years, he shared the experiences and sometimes commissions of a major sculptor, Jacopo Sansovino, which led him to an increasingly and, in the end, exceptionally solidly structured style. These were the years in which Il Rosso and Pontormo were his pupils, and it may fairly be said that about 1513–14 the leadership in Florentine painting passed from the workshop of Fra’ Bartolommeo to that of Andrea del Sarto.

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In 1517 or 1518 Sarto married Lucrezia del Fede, a widow whom he had, according to her testimony, used as a model for several years; she brought him property and a useful dowry. In 1518 he was summoned by the king of France, Francis I, to Fontainebleau, where he was preceded by a reputation based upon pictures made for export. It is unlikely that he found the life of a court artist congenial, and he remained for a year or less without beginning any major commission. Soon after his return, his connections with the Medici family (powerful since their return to Florence from exile in 1512) led to the most significant contract of his career—for part of the decoration of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano, near Florence. The patron was in fact the pope, Leo X, whom Sarto almost certainly visited in Rome in 1519–20; but the project, the only one that ever offered Florentine artists the scope that Raphael had in the Vatican Palace, collapsed when the pope died in December 1521. Sarto’s fresco Tribute to Caesar is a fragment now incorporated into a much later decorational scheme.

In 1520 Sarto began to build himself a house in Florence, which was later inhabited and modified by several other painters; it was a substantial property without being a palace. By 1523 he had a manservant as well as apprentices. Throughout his life he was content to work, when it suited him, for nominal fees, for no remuneration at all, or for only part of a fee offered to him, probably because he was in comfortable circumstances. He would paint for a carpenter or a king. A plague in 1523–24 drove Sarto and his wife to seek security in the Mugello, a valley north of Florence, but the interruption was brief. After the expulsion of the Medici, once again, in 1527, he worked for the republican government of Florence. His Sacrifice of Isaac, intended as a political present to Francis I, was painted in this period. After the siege of Florence by imperial and papal forces, he succumbed to a new wave of plague and died in his house. Sources differ on the exact date of Sarto’s death, but documents show that he was buried in SS. Annunziata on Sept. 29, 1530.

Andrea del Sarto’s most striking monument is the grisaille (gray monochrome) series of frescoes on the life of St. John the Baptist in the Chiostro dello Scalzo in Florence. Begun about 1511, the work was not completed until 1526, and almost all of it was painted by his own hand, so that it reads like an artistic autobiography covering the greater part of his career. His portraits of his wife, Lucrezia (c. 1513–14 and c. 1522), can be supplemented by many others disguised as Madonnas (e.g., the celebrated Madonna of the Harpies), just as his self-portraits in the Uffizi and in the National Gallery of Scotland at Edinburgh (both c. 1528) can possibly be extended by several others, more or less hidden in his paintings from 1511 onward. A badly damaged pair of circular portraits of Andrea and Lucrezia at the Art Institute of Chicago appear to be signed (completed about 1530).

Sarto’s style is marked throughout his career by an interest in effects of colour and atmosphere and by sophisticated informality and natural expression of emotion. In his early works such as the Marriage of St. Catherine, the search for the expression of animation and emotion led to an ecstatic and nonidealistic style that proved immensely attractive to a younger generation of painters. Restraint increasing with maturity did not inhibit the achievement of such passionate later works as the Pietà (c. 1520), but the mood is always intimate and never rhetorical. In the 1520s his style, as a result of the influence of Michelangelo or of artistic events in Rome, became perceptibly more ideal and more polished and approximates what may properly be called a grand manner in the last of the Scalzo frescoes, the Birth of the Baptist (1526). From first to last, Sarto’s integrity as a craftsman, his sheer professionalism, is impressively consistent; and it is characteristic of him that he refused to have his works engraved. His real quality is also vividly revealed in his drawings. Among his pupils and followers were most of the significant Florentine painters of the first half of the 16th century—Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo, Francesco Salviati, and Giorgio Vasari, for example—and it is largely through his example that the tradition of Florentine art was transmitted through to the end of the Renaissance and was able to embrace the stylistic innovations made about 1500 by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.