Andrea del Sarto

Background

Andrea del Sarto was born in Florence on 16 July 1486. Since his father, Agnolo, was a tailor, he became known as "del Sarto" (meaning "tailor's son").

Education

According to Vasari, who was a pupil of Andrea, he was trained with a goldsmith from the age of 7. An earlier source identifies Andrea's master, quite convincingly, as Rafaellino del Garbo, a highly competent and successful painter of the late 15th century.

Andrea del Sarto was a pupil of Piero di Cosimo and was greatly influenced by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Fra’ Bartolommeo.

Career

Andrea 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 and 1525), 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.

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 decoration 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 the effects of color 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.

Achievements

• Andrea del Sarto was one of the most important painters of the High Renaissance. His highly expressive use of color is unsurpassed in Florentine painting.
  
  With Michelangelo and Raphael working in Rome, Andrea del Sarto became the leading painter in Florence following the death of Fra Bartolommeo in 1517, and through his pupils, II Rosso and Pontormo, he was a vital formative influence on the development of mannerism. His popularity in the 16th century is demonstrated by the survival of an exceptional number of copies of his works.
  
  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).

Works

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  • Artisoo Archangel Raphael with Tobias, St. Lawrence and the Donor Leonardo di Lorenzo Morelli - Oil painting reproduction 30'' x 25'' - Andrea del Sarto

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  • Andrea Del Sarto Last Supper Framed Print in a 28" X 13" H Walnut Wood Frame. Hand Cut Double Beveled Mats Under Glass. Boxed

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Personality

Andrea seems to have been a kindly, unassuming man with high professional standards and a profound understanding of humanity. He was genuinely pious, sometimes working for a nominal fee or, as in the case of the Madonna del Sacco (SS. Annunziata, 1525), waiving his fee altogether. Vasari interprets this as timidity and weakness, but it is more likely that Andrea, who was patronized by the Pope and the King of France, was sufficiently prosperous to afford such generosity.

Connections

Andrea married to Lucrezia (del Fede), widow of a hatter named Carlo, of Recanati, on 26 December 1512. Lucrezia appears in many of his paintings, often as a Madonna. However, Vasari describes her as "faithless, jealous, and vixenish with the apprentices. "

Father:

Agnolo di Francesco di Luca Vannucchi

Spouse:

Lucrezia (del Fede)

Brother:

Francesco d'Agnolo

( d.1551 )

Friend:

Franciabigio

References

• Storia Pittorica Della Italia: Dal Risorgimento Delle Belle Arti Fin Presso Al Fine del XVIII Secolo; Volume 1 (Italian Edition)
• Andrea del Sarto
• The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)
• Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori e scultori e architettori (Italian Edition)