377. Iste perfecit opus. "This one did the work."
381. Hot cockles. An old English game in which a blind-folded player tries to guess the names of those who touch or strike him.
[ANDREA DEL SARTO]
Andrea del Sarto's father was a tailor (Sarto) and so the son was nicknamed "The Tailor's Andrew." He was born in 1486. His first paintings were seven frescoes in the Church of the Annunziata in Florence. They were "marvelous productions for a youth who was little over twenty, and remain Andrea's most charming and attractive works." (Julia Cartwright, The Painters of Florence.) Algernon Charles Swinburne in Essays and Studies ("Notes and Designs on the Old Masters at Florence") says of Andrea's early paintings in comparison with his later work: "These are the first fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight and of flight had passed from weary wing and clouding eye, the old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out of hand and heart.
"How the change fell upon him, and how it wrought, anyone may see who compares his later with his earlier work.... The time came when another than Salome [referring to Andrea del Sarto's picture of Salome dancing before Herod] was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her hands.... In Mr. Browning's noblest poem—his noblest, it seems to me—the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly touched upon—missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skillful—the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was corroded by it, and his soul burnt into dead ashes we are shown in full, but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he might have been without it."
The bare facts of this poem are taken from Vasari's Lives of the Painters. Vasari, once a pupil of Andrea del Sarto, hated Lucrezia and in his account spared no details of her evil influence. Later chronicles give a somewhat more favorable view of her, but the main facts of the story remain undisputed. Of the origin of the poem, Mrs. Andrew Crosse (see "John Kenyon and His Friends" in Temple Bar Magazine, April, 1900) writes; "When the Brownings were living in Florence, Kenyon had begged them to procure him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of Andrea del Sarto and his wife. Mr. Browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto—and sent it to Kenyon!" For another literary presentation of Andrea del Sarto see Andre del Sarto, a play by Alfred de Musset.
15. Fiesole. A town on a hill above the Arno about three miles northwest of Florence. See [Pippa Passes].
40. We are in God's hand. Andrea's fatalistic view of life aids him in escaping the poignancy of remorse.
65. The Legate's talk. The representative of the Pope praised Andrea's work. For the high esteem accorded Andrea when he was in Paris at the court of Francis I, see lines 149-161.