Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Andrea del Sarto
Italian; 16th-century
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
85%
The Lamentation of Christ. c1519. Oil on canvas
Compared with those of his Florentine contemporaries, there's uncommon verve in the actual surfaces of Andrea's canvases, which makes them more viscerally enthralling but also less perfect than much Renaissance art. The dragging and pooling of paint that creates the characteristic spectrality of his figures and their indefinite surroundings would be alien amongst the geometries of a composition by, say, Raphael, but Andrea's tendency towards general atmosphere over particular structure allows for — demands, even — his more equivocal touch. The arrangement of this picture is a little thick, gummy, but it's that very thickness that makes Mary's blue cloak weep and wail against Christ's pallor, that makes shapes and colors that ought to be incommensurable seem poised to fuse into a solid mass (the death-gray of the savior's throat with the angel's green robe; various flesh tones with the impossible pink that's wrapped around Jesus' waist). Still, there's a lack of control here — see the way the islands of exposed skin in the canvas's upper half struggle to communicate with each other those across oceans of vivid paint — that is not worth apologizing for. Andrea's single-figure compositions (I'm thinking especially of the one in Worcester) gain more and suffer less from his laxity. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
85%
The Madonna and Child, Saint Elizabeth and the Baptist. c1513. Oil on wood
Andrea's all about his palpable paint, the way it manifests as something that isn't quite reducible to the image it's conveying. He's not, however, all about his compositions, which tend to be soggier than they need to be, as if they're being overpowered or set off course by his handling. (The grouping of the figures here is serviceable, but the orb of negative space that's built up between the laps of the women and the arced bodies of their babies doesn't ever get the release it deserves, perhaps because Mary's torso is just a little too flat and frontal.) But then, that handling! Look at John's belly, where Elizabeth's hand pumps his skin into whorls of streaking blacks and fleshtones that drip down his leg and off into the crevice of dark paint between him and his mother's robes. Paint here tends to brim and bridle with all its own frustrated potential till its way into some recess of the composition and settles there. It's why the eyes of Andrea's figures are always so deep-set and sullen: they're the loci of all the things his paintings wanted to be but, limited by history, couldn't. (TFS, 2025)