"St. John the Baptist"

Seldom if ever again did Andrea del Sarto rise to the poetic heights he attained in his "St. John the Baptist." St. John's features distinctly resemble those of the painter's wife, Lucrezia, who so often sat as his model. Indeed, as Vasari says, "If Andrea took a model from any other face there was always a resemblance to hers in the painting, not only because he had this woman constantly before him and depicted her so frequently, but, what is more, because he had her lineaments engraved on his heart."

In widowhood, her pride was to have been the wife of "the faultless painter."

ANDREA DEL SARTO 1486 – 1531

Curiously, it was the misfortune of Andrea del Sarto, or Andrea d'Agnolo, as he generally signs himself, to be called the "faultless painter", which is praise that implies a want of ardor, and touches the core of his shortcomings. Over and over he is described as the painter who stops just short of perfect fulfillment, but he ranks high among his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo and Raphael.

Andrea was the son of a tailor named Agnolo, whence his appellation del Sarto, for Andrea del Sarto merely means "the tailor's Andrew", and when barely of age painted seven frescos from the life of St. Philip Benizzi in the Servile Church of the Annunziata in Florence for the sum of ten florins apiece. They are marvelous productions for so young an artist and remain his most charming and attractive fresco work. Directly after doing these masterpieces he created a series of chiaroscuro subjects from the life of John the Baptist in the cloisters of the Scalzo or Barefooted Friars, which reveal his remarkable genius at its peak.

Of his wife, who posed for so many of his paintings and who was the widow of a Florentine hatter, Vasari records that "her violent and overbearing temper drove away his favorite pupil, and several of his best apprentices, while her extravagance involved him in constant difficulties. He soon found that he had not only his wife but her father and sisters to keep, compelling him to toil incessantly and to neglect his own parents", who, if we are to believe Vasari, "died in miserable poverty."

At thirty-two, Andrea found a generous patron in King Francis I of France, but while he was enjoying the change from the narrowness and poverty of his Florentine life to the splendor of the French court his wife became impatient for his return, "being more anxious to profit by his gains than to see him again." Her entreaties prevailed, and he obtained royal leave to return to Florence and take his wife to Paris. Instead of doing the latter he remained in Florence and "spent the money which Francis I had given him to purchase works of art for his palace at Fontainebleau, in buying land and building a house near the Annunziata."