Free hand

WHEN Giorgio Vasari described Andrea del Sarto as a painter “free from errors” he was not so much honouring his teacher as damning him with faint praise. In art, unlike accounting, achievement is not measured by the number of mistakes avoided but by the imaginative vistas opened up. By this standard, del Sarto fell short of the mark, suffering, as Vasari claimed, from “a timidity of spirit”. While his older, bolder colleagues—giants like Michelangelo and Raphael—set out for lands uncharted, del Sarto stuck to familiar terrain. Even worse (again according to Vasari) del Sarto’s lack of ambition was largely formed by his smothering wife, Lucrezia. This unflattering portrait has survived to this day, not least thanks to a poem by Robert Browning, who depicts the henpecked artist sadly diminished by a faithless wife.

Judging by a new exhibition, “Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action”, which began at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and has recently opened at the Frick Collection in New York, Vasari’s criticism was not entirely unfounded. Del Sarto was decidedly a synthesiser and consummate craftsman rather than a visionary. Of the few paintings in the show, two sacred subjects, “Medici Holy Family” and “Saint John the Baptist”, are more dutiful than inspired. Only “Portrait of a Young Man” rises above mere competence: it is not only masterly, but a revelation of character caught on the quick.

But this is not the whole story. Where del Sarto shows himself to be the equal of any artist in history is in his drawings, the bulk of the show. Del Sarto’s natural idiom is small scale, and the immediacy of the medium suited his retiring nature. Anyone who has ever taken a life-drawing class will marvel at his skill in capturing nuances of light and shade. What is lost in the translation from studio sketch to finished painting is apparent when comparing the black chalk “Study for the Head of Saint John the Baptist” with the finished painting. Where the drawing bursts from the page with sparkling life, the painting seems both bland and slightly cloying.

With his favoured red chalk in hand, del Sarto could conjure a world with a few deft strokes, as in “Study of a Standing Male Figure”, a work that seems almost modern in its boldness and economy. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the “Study for the Head of Julius Caesar”, an exquisitely wrought portrait of a handsome young face that manages to summon an ideal without sacrificing the flesh-and-blood presence of the model.

One of the strengths of the show, as Aimee Ng, the associate curator, points out, is that it allows the viewer to “peer over the shoulder” of the artist as he proceeds from idea to finished product. A sheet of studies for del Sarto’s fresco in the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, “The Madonna of the Sack”, shows him trying out various compositions, rejecting one after another until he settles on the final version. Here the visitor sees del Sarto’s quick mind and quicker hand, gaining a privileged glimpse of a master at work.

The artist’s gifts are on full display in the black chalk drawing “Head of a Young Woman” (pictured), believed to be a portrait of the much maligned Lucrezia. Given her beauty and the tenderness with which the artist renders her, one is convinced that both Vasari and Browning misjudged the true nature of their relationship.