For the three works painted at Luco Andrea was paid ninety florins in gold. The Pietà, was bought in later years by the Grand Duke Leopold, and now adorns the Pitti Palace.
The Visitation was placed in the church of the convent over a presepio. [Footnote: In 1818 it was restored by Luigi Scotti and sold.] Biadi gives the following document:—"Io Andrea d'Angiolo del Sarto, à di 11 Ottobre 1528 ho ricevuto fiorini 80 d' oro di quei larghi [i.e. of two scudi each] della Tavola dell' Altar grande e di una mezza tavola della Visitazione, da Donna Caterina della Casa Fiorentina, Badessa di Luco." [Footnote: 2 Vol. in. p, 571, note.]
Andrea was paid ten florins for the Head of the Saviour, through his assistant, Raffaello. This receipt would prove either that he went to Luco later than 1524, or that he returned there to finish the works in the year 1528.
On their return to Florence in the autumn Andrea painted a fine work for his friend, Beccuccio da Gambassi, a glass-worker. It is an apotheosis of the Madonna, with four figures beneath—S. John Baptist, Mary Magdalen, S. Sebastian, and S. Rocco; not S. Onofrio, as Bottari has named it. The predella, now lost, had portraits of the patron and his wife. Crowe and Cavalcaselle speak of six saints in this picture, four standing and two kneeling.
This description seems to point more certainly to the Sarzana Madonna, which is now in the Hall of Apollo, in the Pitti Palace. That for Beccuccio is described, with the four above-mentioned saints only, by all the Italian authors.
The tabernacle, at the corner of the convent, outside the Porta Pinti, Florence, was painted about this time. It is now quite destroyed by age and weather; a good copy by Empoli, exists, however, in the western corridor of the Uffizi. It is a charming Holy Family, with the infant S. John,—a sweet laughing face. The Madonna is a portrait of Lucrezia.
In the siege when the convent of the Ingesuate—at the corner of which it stood—was razed to the ground, this fresco, although loosened from the wall, was spared by the soldiers, who had not courage to injure it. The Grand Duke Cosimo was anxious to have it brought to Florence, and often came with engineers and architects, but they never hazarded its removal. [Footnote: Bocchi, Bellezze di Firenze, p. 482.]
The Duomo of Pisa has five saints painted by Andrea; they originally formed one large picture in five compartments, and were painted for the church of the now suppressed convent of S. Agnes; but in 1618 they were divided into five pictures, and removed to the Duomo, where S. Catherine Martyr, S. Margaret, S. Peter, and S. John the Baptist hang on each side of the altar. S. Agnes, with her lamb by her side, is placed on a pilaster towards the southern door. This and S. Margaret are especially graceful and expressive. There is much of the feeling of Correggio, but with more natural grace and less voluptuousness. The cutting and retouching had injured them greatly, but in 1835 Antonio Garazalli took off the repainting and restored them more delicately.
In 1525 Andrea had a commission to draw cartoons for painting the balustrade of the Ringhiera—a kind of wide terrace in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, from which speeches were made to the populace. His designs were very beautiful and appropriate, the compartments being emblematical of the different quarters of the city; besides which were allegories of mountains, rivers, and virtues. The designs were left unfinished at his death, and the Ringhiera was never painted.
In 1526-7 he worked at the fresco of the Last Supper, at S. Salvi, which was intended to have been done when he began the four saints there, in 1510, had not some misunderstanding between the rulers of the order prevented their continuation. [Footnote: Vasari's Lives, vol. iii. p. 224.] Even now he worked in a desultory manner, doing it bit by bit, but in the end producing a marvellous work.