Artist

Andrea del Sarto

Year
Florence 1486 - 1530 Florence

Style
Mannerism

Active region
Italy: Florence

Price range
1,000,000 – 3,000,000 USD +

Andrea del Sarto was a leading figure in the development of Florentine ‘Mannerist’ style.

Superseding the dominant High Renaissance manner championed in Florence by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto was unusually attuned to the use of pigments as an artist active in a city where disegno reigned over colore. His paintings are characterized by their rich hues and soft atmospheric qualities; the figures typically have blurred contours in the flesh and crisp folds in their voluminous draperies. As a fluent draftsman, his deep interest in human emotion and animation is perhaps best conveyed in his expressive heads and compositional studies rendered in red and black chalk.

Sarto’s surname was most likely Lanfranchi, but as his father was a tailor, his moniker became “del Sarto”. He was trained in the workshop of the famously inventive and eccentric Piero di Cosimo, but likewise drew inspiration from Leonardo’s sfumato and Raphael’s harmonious compositions. Sarto developed an intense rivalry with the latter, who stayed in Florence between 1504-08. Sarto’s first independent works date from around 1506. Early on, he developed a longstanding relationship with the Servite church and convent of the Santissima Annunziata, painting frescoes in the Chiostro dei Voti between 1509–14 and in the Chiostro Grande in 1525. So close was his association with the institution that he established his workshop nearby around 1511. Around the same time, his friendship with the sculptor Jacopo Sansovino led both to new commissions and to a more three-dimensional approach to painting. In the subsequent few years, Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo, who would become the reigning figures of Florentine Mannerism, became his pupils, as later would Francesco Salviati and Giorgio Vasari. It was also around this time, 1513–14, that Sarto supplanted Fra’ Bartolommeo as Florence’s leading painter.

In 1517 or 1518 Sarto married Lucrezia del Fede, a widow with a substantial dowry and property, allowing him a comfortable lifestyle and the freedom to pick and choose amongst proposed commissions. Having sent a Pietà and a Madonna to the court of France, François I summoned him to Fontainebleau in 1518. The role of court painter seems not to have suited Sarto, and within a year, he returned to Florence not having begun a single commission. More congenial were his relations with the Medici, who commissioned from Sarto part of the decoration of their villa at Poggio a Caiano, near Florence. Fundamental to this enterprise was the patronage of the Medici Pope Leo X, whom Sarto likely visited in Rome in around 1519–20. The project ceased with the Pope’s death in 1521, and Sarto’s fragmentary fresco, the Tribute to Caesar, is all that remains.

Despite Sarto’s brilliant command of vibrant color, his series of grisaille frescoes depicting scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist in the Chiostro dello Scalzo (the premises of a religious company devoted to the Baptist and the Passion) are his undisputed masterpiece. Sarto began the cycle around 1511 but did not complete the work until 1526—thus the frescoes act as a sort of pictorial autobiography of his artistic development.

Sarto was an accomplished albeit occasional portraitist. In addition to a self-portrait (ca. 1528, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), he recorded the likeness of his friends such as Baccio Bandinelli and Becuccio Bicchieraio, and painted portraits of as yet unidentified sitters (e.g. 1517-18, The National Gallery, London). A recurring subject is his wife, Lucrezia (e.g. 1513–14, Museo Nacional del Prado), who he often used as a model for his Madonnas, in particular the celebrated Madonna of the Harpies (1517, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence). Sarto’s infatuation with Lucrezia inspired Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘Andrea del Sarto’, famously published in his 1855 poetry collection entitled Men and Women. Indeed, while Vasari couldn’t lavish enough praise on Sarto, calling him the ‘faultless painter’, another high point in his appreciation was Victorian England. Evoking Browning, Edward Burne-Jones declared Sarto one of his favorite artists in the 1870s.

Selected artworks

Market

Top 3 auction prices

1,102,500 $
2000

2,198,000 $
2022

11,426,178 $
2005

Details

The sales are: Sotheby’s New York –28 January 2000 lot 12, Sotheby’s New York – 27 January 2022 lot 20, and Christie’s London – 5 July 2005 lot 14 (6,504,000 GBP; work on paper). The third highest price for an Andrea del Sarto painting in auction was a work catalogued as ‘attributed to Andrea del Sarto’, sold 6 December 1997 at Kunsthaus Lempertz. Very few paintings by del Sarto have been sold publicly since the 1980s.

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Books on Andrea del Sarto

Julian Brooks, ed., Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 2015.

Antonio Natali, Andrea del Sarto: maestro della “maniera moderna”, Milan, 1998.

Antonio Natali and Alessandro Cecchi, Andrea del Sarto: catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1989.

John K. G. Shearman, Andrea del Sarto, Oxford, 1965.

S. J. Freedberg, Andrea del Sarto. Cambridge, Mass., 1963.

H. Guinness, Andrea del Sarto, London, 1899.

Robert Browning, ‘Andrea del Sarto‘, Men and Women, 1855.

Notable Exhibitions

Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action, 23 June–13 September 2015; travelled to New York, The Frick Collection, 7 October 2015–10 January 2016. Curated by Julian Brooks, Denise Allen and Xavier F. Salomon.

Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Andrea del Sarto 1486–1530, dipinti e disegni a Firenze, 8 November 1986–1 March 1987. Curated by Alessandro Cecchi and Antonio Natali.