Fig. 160. Fra Bartolommeo. Copy of Lost Fresco of Last Judgment.—Uffizi.
“The Perfect Painter” was what the Florentines called Andrea del Sarto,[[58]] and he merited the title. He produced no masterpiece of the first order, but his Work is singularly uniform on a high level. Its chief qualities are dignity and grace with a great richness of color. The deep shadows are warm and full of dusky light, the stylistic poses of the figures always easy, and the weaving of the complicated groupings ever tasteful and harmonious. To the refractory art of fresco painting Andrea brought a richness, depth and variety of color that others hardly attained in oil painting. Only Luini in the north came near him in this regard. In short he is a consummate technician, carrying his art as far as skill and taste unillumined by sheer genius will reach.
Fig. 161. Andrea del Sarto. Birth.—Annunziata.
Little of his excellence can be laid to his early training. Before 1500 he was working with Piero di Cosimo, and Andrea’s youthful frescoes of the miracles of S. Filippo Benizzi, in the fore-court of the Annunziata, show the loose and animated arrangements and the exaggeration of picturesque landscape features characteristic of his master. But Andrea learned rather of the time-spirit than of any other master. By 1514 his art is complete and one may see its flowering in the frescoes of the Birth of the Virgin, Figure [161], and the Madonna of the Sack, Figure [162], respectively in the fore-court and in the cloister of the Annunziata. It is a sumptuous and grave kind of design redeemed from heaviness by its exquisite balance of color masses, and from conventionality by the hint of portraiture in the artfully disposed figures.
Fig. 162. Andrea del Sarto. Madonna of the Sack.—Annunziata.
Scores of times Andrea repeats these perfections in the great altar-backs required for the new Renaissance chapels. The Four Saints in the Pitti, the Madonna of the Harpies in the Uffizi, Figure [162a], the Enthroned Madonna at Berlin may serve among many to illustrate his accomplishment in this new vein. Somewhat reminiscent of the heavier monumentality of Fra Bartolommeo, these great pictures add a personal and disquieting note from the presence of the moody, handsome wife, Lucrezia whose caprices and infidelities are the tragic element in an otherwise even life.
