Finishing with del Sarto posts, here is one Assumption of the Virgin that he painted the year he died, in 1530. The reason why I am posting this one is both for the fact that it was one of his last works but also for the two figures in the middle that I really like : among 4 saints in the middle are the beautiful Fedele (with the sword) and Catherine of Alexandria. All four saints are very nicely done, but these two look at observers, especially so St Fidele does it in a way that silently demands attention … I couldn’t resist them ;)

Other than his portraits I do love his (very beautiful) saints :) This one is among my favourites : St John the Baptist, c. 1523 from Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

This is a celebrated picture. Although actually disfigured by bad restorations in old times which have changed the background and diminished the splendor and especially the interrelation of colors, there still remains the frank, original and lively conception of this youthful figure.

The impressive image of the young Baptist, of an evocative power that in this case also one might call pre-Baroque, emerges from a dark grey background in which one glimpses the slightly pinkish rockface of a grotto. The athletic figure, the animal skin and the cloak are thrown into relief by a dramatic light that still illumines wonderful pictorial effects visible in the better preserved parts, such as the cross made of cane in the lower corner. These are the effects that will be taken up again by many of the Florentine painters of the 17th century.
Web Gallery of Art

Andrea del Sarto - Portrait of a Woman with a Basket of Spindles, c. 1517

Another exquisite portrait by del Sarto that holds a special interest : it was most probably finished by his pupil Pontormo :)

Great dignity and extreme tenderness can be seen in this superb portrait of Woman with a Basket of Spindles. For a long time it was thought to be by Pontormo and only recently attributed to Andrea del Sarto. This is possibly one of the paintings that Andrea del Sarto began and his assistant Jacopo Pontormo finished. Typical of Andrea, in fact, are the slightly rotating planes, aimed at defining a compact mass in movement, totally remote from the harsh, almost neo-Gothic line which distinguishes the portrait-painting of Pontormo. The heavy use of chiaroscuro takes nothing away from the chromatic richness of the clothes whose soft drapery confers to the woman a classic monumentality.
Web Gallery of Art

Although his fame rests mostly upon holy families and Virgins, my favourite paintings by del Sarto are his portraits. These two are the ones I perhaps love the best : Portrait of Baccio Bandinelli and Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1517, which was for long considered to be his self-portrait. 

Portrait of Baccio Bandinelli that we see before us is said to be a copy - a very old and extremely good one, but still not the original. This somewhat saddens me since I really love it, although not so much the man depicted : it is the famous sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, the arch enemy of Michelangelo - or - it is far more honest to say : to whom Michelangelo was an arch enemy. Baccio was such a nasty, jealous character that he even destroyed, tearing it apart, Michelangelo’s cartoon for Battle of Cascina. He indeed was obsessed by him.

The other portrait is an original :) it is sometimes called Portrait of a sculptor, 
although the man is looking at the book. For long it was thought that this is Andrea himself, but that is now mostly discarded. 

Andrea del Sarto - Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1513-14

In December 1512 Andrea the tailor’s son married one Lucrezia del Fede, widow of a hatter named Carlo. This wealthy woman was not a favourite of del Sarto’s pupil and later biographer Vasari, who said she was faithless, jealous, and vixenish with the apprentices. There was also a tale of Lucrezia insisting that Andrea should come back home, after he’d been living in France for a while, invited by no other than the king Francis I, the same one who invited Leonardo da Vinci; as the story goes the king did agree that Andrea should go home, but only for short while, and even gave him some money to buy art for him in Florence. Upon arriving, however, it is said that Andrea and Lucrezia spent all the money on buying a new house for themselves, which meant that del Sarto could never go back to France. This story is probably not completely true though ;) 

Lucrezia survived Andrea by no less than 40 years; he died of plague in 1530. It was her face that we know see not only on this portrait, but also on many of his Madonnas.

Birthday to one of my favourite High Renaissance painters, who - although very important indeed - often gets overlooked; such is the fate of artists that lived in time of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. 

Andrea del Sarto was born in Florence in 1486, which means that he was younger even than Raphael, 3 years his senior, while Leonardo was 34 years older than him; roughly at the time that Andrea was born, Leonardo was finishing The Virgin of the Rocks while Michelangelo was soon to become an apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio. In other words, Andrea del Sarto belongs to Raphael’s generation of Renaissance artists.

Andrea’s real name was too long to mention; del Sarto is a nickname he got, because of his father’s trade : he was known as tailor’s son, del Sarto, and this nickname from youth stuck with him until his death and then further on into art history. Other than being called the tailor’s son, Andrea had another nickname acquired by his talent alone : they called him Andrea senza errori - Andrea without errors, an estimate to which one of his pupils that also wrote his biography and whom we know well as Giorgio Vasari - was partly critical of. However, Vasari’s greatest role model Michelangelo thought very highly of Andrea’s abilities. This should speak volumes since Il divino was not that keen to praise many of his colleagues ;)

Andrea unfortunately lived only 43 years; in 1530 he died of plague. He is considered to be the best painter of his generation living in Florence, where he spent most of his life. A High Renaissance painter he is at the same time the harbinger of Mannerism, of which his pupil Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo, will be one of main exponents. 

Self-portrait, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence