New York
Andrea del Sarto is the perfect example of an artist for whom modernity has no use. That he was an excellent painter is universally acknowledged by anyone who has bothered to look at his art. But his originality was not so potent as to compel the attention of our listless age: It was a tactical originality that arrived at certain stunning compositional and chromatic solutions, rather than the titanic originality of a Michelangelo or a Raphael, his contemporaries, who conjured into being new worlds and new ways of seeing.
Nevertheless, two eminent New York institutions, the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have staged simultaneous shows of del Sarto that may prompt a general reassessment of the artist. Today, he survives in an unenviable purgatory: People have heard of him and they know that he is important, but they are not certain why.
Some of them may recall that Robert Browning wrote a tedious poem in which, echoing Vasari, he described del Sarto as The Faultless Painter. That assessment, of course, was the kiss of death: Faultlessness is one of those qualities, like celibacy and thrift, that are admirable in theory, but have lost the moralistic glow they once possessed. However that might be, Browning’s assessment of del Sarto has always seemed wrong: Although he viewed the Florentine as an artist of considerable competence but limited inspiration, in fact del Sarto was a painter of great style whose eccentricities sometimes got the better of his skills.
Browning and his generation would not have known or understood the term, but del Sarto was what today we would call a Mannerist. The 19th century perceived only his formal grace and the sturdy competence of his art, without appreciating the shadows and flickering instability of his worldview. Born in 1486, three years after Raphael, he used distorted colors and poses to express what was only implicit in the works of Raphael and the earlier Michelangelo. Like all Mannerists, he saw the world through a film of artifice and imbued everything with an air of rarefied theatricality.
In the great frescoes that he painted on the walls of the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, the figures move, not in the static postures of the Quattrocento but, rather, in a formalized dance first set in motion by Michelangelo, from whom many of del Sarto’s figures derive. As regards the colors and paint textures, the Met’s Borgherini Holy Family exhibits a feathery, fidgety tocco or touch whose suppression of details cannot be entirely attributed to the painting’s imperfect state of preservation. The colors as well achieve an unnatural degree of saturation in the Prado’s Sacrifice of Isaac, while the faces in Medici Holy Family are so heavily imbued with Leonardo’s sfumato or smokiness that they seem almost overripe.
But if the two New York shows confirm these convictions about the artist, they also challenge them. Neither show is a retrospective. The Frick exhibition, a slightly abbreviated version of a show that began at the Getty, is centered around the artist’s drawings, with only a scattering of paintings. The Met has mounted one of those focus shows that it does so well, consisting of its own Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist (the Borgherini Holy Family), as well as the closely related Charity from the National Gallery in Washington and a Madonna and Child from a private collection.
In the drawings upon which the paintings were based, the drawings that form the bulk of the Frick exhibition, that film of artifice has been removed. One has almost a sense that del Sarto’s paintings were created in a controlled, but slightly febrile, ecstasy that infused every particle of the observable world with the radiance of an altered state. But in the drawings, more often than not, the painter’s gaze returns, almost reluctantly, to reality. A sober-sided vision takes over and, with it, a disabused focus on what presents itself to the corporeal eye, rather than to that eye of the mind, that Platonic idea that was so central to the entire Mannerist movement.
Compare the five studies for a lunette of Virgin and Child with the stylized fresco painting in Santa Annunziata in Florence that resulted from them: In the former, we have the vivid sense of del Sarto standing, pencil in hand, before a real mother and her son who, impatient at having to sit still for the artist, struggles to break free from his mother’s embrace. In del Sarto’s Study for the Head of Julius Caesar, we intuitively feel that a creature of flesh and blood is rising up before us.
But no sooner have we perceived this naturalism than we find that we may also need to reassess many of del Sarto’s paintings. For underneath that film of artifice lies an enduring substructure of tough and committed observation of the real and tactile world. To take one example—but a magnificent example—consider Portrait of a Young Man from the National Gallery in London and now on view at the Frick. Both the tour de force of the man’s lavender sleeve and the theatrical murkiness of his bony face make this, at first glance, a textbook example of Mannerist distortion. But the longer you look, the more commanding and unmediated his presence becomes, rising up with startling ferocity from the surface of the painting.
That face is every bit as faultless as Browning believed, but it is so much more. And as these exhibitions make abundantly clear, Andrea del Sarto repays far closer inspection than he has received in many years.
James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City
