Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d’Agnolo)
Italian; 16th-century
Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum
90%
Saint John the Baptist. c1517. Oil on panel transferred to canvas
Andrea's to be liked less for his compositions than for the reckless precision of his color, the yearning that's there inside his shadowed surfaces, and the sheer taste of his paint. That's why this piece is in the upper echelon of his oeuvre: with its single figure, there's very little for the profligacy of his approach to get in the way of. (Had Andrea been able to sustain his painterly effects without letting them detract from his pictures' bones, he would have been among Europe's greatest artists.) Design seems for Andrea to have been but a pretext for experimenting with color and light: the skin of the Baptist looks almost sickly for how differentiated it is, the sky behind him is likewise a squall. There's nothing compositionally wrong with the picture, and much that's very much right: the cupping of the staff by the baptist's fingers, the stern frontal posture of his arm against the slight arabesque of the rest of his body. But where the art of this painting resides is in its softness, its grading, its violent transitions, its flux. Andrea was a strange Renaissance painter. This is one of his triumphs. (TFS, 2025)
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)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
72%
Portrait of a Man. 1528-29. Oil on canvas
There's more verisimilitude in this portrait than in much other work by del Sarto, but it's not quite as aesthetically significant as the stuff of his that has less reality in it. That's because del Sarto's magic is in his brush — in the way, especially, he tends to paint shadowed surfaces as colliding planes of hue — and there's just not much brush here. The overall dark tone of this painting quells the intensity of its shifts in value; the lit shoulder, for instance, is a meek instance of contrast. In terms of structure, the painting is unimpeachable and unremarkable. The pose is somewhat inelastic, but that problem is just about solved by the cock of the sitter's head. The orientation of his fingers around that little book he's holding is a jolt to the otherwise staid picture. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
68%
The Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist. c1528. Oil on wood
The knotty arrangement of figures detracts from what's good about Andrea, that is, his tonal extravagance and his insane shading. Actually, it's the other way around, but the upshot is the same: this painting's endless interlocking of colors and shadows and planes of light detracts from the unity of its overall structure, making Andrea's painterliness seem much less like his greatest gift (which is how it seems in his less involved compositions) than like an aesthetic liability (which is how it's working here). It would be too easy to take up Joseph's weirdly darkened mug as my target. So I can point to John's torso or the groin of the Christ Child or Mary's fingers on her baby's arm: it's as if the mass and positioning of all the objects in this picture are competing with the way the picture itself has been painted. Another way of saying this is that each figure is more impressive than all of them together. (I guess that's what the hundreds-year-old gripe about Andrea being too perfect an artist points too. He can lose sight of the forest of his images for the trees of their modeling and hues.) Christ's loin cloth, with its breathing blues and pinks, is an unequivocal success. (TFS, 2026)