Painters, poets and posterity: Giorgio Vasari and Robert Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’

“Such an injury would vex a very saint.” The Taming of the Shrew

I

Giorgio Vasari, author of the Lives of the Painters (1550), lived and worked as a young apprentice in the troubled household of the Florentine painter, Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530). In the absence of other eyewitnesses to the artists of Renaissance Italy, his impressions long had great authority among art historians. Since Vasari didn’t even know the family name of del Sarto (who was the son of a tailor) and misstated his birth date by eight years, scholars have questioned the facts in his indictment. But few have examined Vasari’s assumptions and motives, and no one has analysed the emotional dynamics of the uxorious Andrea and his overbearing wife. While Vasari expressed admiration for both Andrea and his art, claiming, “I hope these writings of mine will preserve their memory for many centuries,” they had quite the opposite effect. Vasari’s brief biography, concocted with a mixture of truth and venom, corroded Andrea’s reputation for several centuries.

Vasari immediately states his speculative thesis and condemns Andrea’s character. He calls him mild, good-natured and easy-going, as well as mean-spirited and weak-willed. Vasari praises Andrea’s colouring, design and invention, but confidently declares: “a timidity of spirit and a yielding simple nature prevented him from exhibiting a burning ardor and dash that, joined to his other qualities, would have made him divine. This defect deprived his work of the ornament, magnificence and wealth of style seen in many other painters.” 

He argues that Andrea’s obliging nature explains his degrading submission to his dreadful wife, and that his art was radically flawed by his supposed defects of character rather than by his lack of creative genius. But a bad character does not inevitably produce bad art. Cellini and Caravaggio were murderers, Sodoma was sexually perverse. In modern times Gauguin had sex with children, Picasso mistreated women, Francis Bacon indulged in sexual torture, but they all created great art.

An older friend warned Vasari to be very careful when getting married: “Remember that Andrea del Sarto had a vigorous wife, who would rather have had two husbands than one!” Vasari’s compressed account of Andrea’s marriage leaves important questions unanswered: “Falling in love with a young woman soon after she became a widow he married her, and had much more trouble for the rest of his life, being obliged to work far harder than before, because, in addition to the usual labour and trials of such a condition, he suffered from additional ones, being tormented by jealousy and other things.” It’s quite normal for a husband to work harder to support his family, which is not usually all “labour and trials”. Though Vasari specifies Andrea’s jealousy, he does not explain the vague but crucial “other things” that tormented him.

Einar Rud’s Vasari’s Life and Lives (1963) gives the background of Andrea’s wife, whose first name suggests “wealth” and surname means “faith,” an ironic contrast to her infidelity: “Lucrezia del Fede, the young wife of a hatter, had set her cap at Andrea and in Vasari’s opinion seduced the good-natured artist, obliging him to marry her after the early death of her husband. Time after time, however, she was unfaithful to him, causing him all the pangs of jealousy, in addition to domineering him and bleeding him for the benefit of her family and to the neglect of his own. She also domineered and bullied the artist’s pupils.” Rud doesn’t mention that the young widow desperately needed a husband to support her and her child. Andrea, infatuated with his beautiful wife and very attached to his little stepdaughter, was a complaisant husband who tolerated her lovers.

Lucrezia del Sarto

Referring to Lucrezia, Vasari writes that Andrea “never painted a woman without using her as his model, and owing to this habit all the women’s heads which he did are alike.” Again, it’s not clear if Lucrezia was the most convenient, inexpensive and obliging model, or if she was also jealous and didn’t want Andrea to use other women. In any case, Andrea certainly painted other models before he married Lucrezia, and when he worked in France and was separated from her.

On another occasion, Vasari notes, “Andrea called his wife Lucrezia and said, ‘Come here; I have some colours left over and I will paint your portrait to show how well preserved you are and yet how different from your first portraits.’ But she would not keep still, possibly having something else on her mind.” Here again Vasari is forced to speculate with “possibly having something else,” without explaining why Lucrezia would not pose for a particularly flattering portrait.

Another puzzling and contentious issue concerns Andrea’s work for the illustrious French King François I at his splendid court at Fontainebleau. François, a great patron of the arts who had invited Leonardo to France, had his magnificent portrait painted by Jean Clouet. After sending the king two of his pictures, Andrea was summoned to France in 15l8. When letters from Lucrezia called him home, he realised how much he missed her and wanted to be with her. The king trusted Andrea and gave him a substantial amount of money to buy Italian paintings and sculptures, and he swore he would return with the bounty and his wife in a few months.

Instead of buying art for the king, Andrea, urged by Lucrezia, used the money to build a house for her in Florence. Vasari states, “though he wished to return, the tears and entreaties of his wife prevailed more than his own needs and his promise to the king. . . François swore that if Andrea ever fell into his hands he would have more pain than pleasure, in spite of his ability. Thus Andrea remained in Florence, fallen very low from his high station.” He did not have the money to repay François, but would have gone back to France if he’d received a royal pardon. 

Once again, the motives of husband and wife are complex and opaque. Andrea was happy, working well and earning good pay in France. If Lucrezia were truly mercenary and lascivious, it would have been far better if he had remained in France, sent her money and left her free to take lovers in his absence. Lucrezia may even have called him back from France and persuaded him to remain with her in Florence because she really loved and missed him. Since she didn’t want to return to France with him, he spent the king’s money on her house and gave up his extremely lucrative position. Andrea risked his life and defied one of the most powerful kings in Europe, who could have had him killed, but he could not control his wife.

Vasari also accuses Lucrezia of callously leaving Andrea, when he was fatally ill, to die alone. When they returned from the countryside to plague-infested Florence, Andrea “fell grievously sick. He took to his bed and was much neglected, his wife fearing infection and keeping away, and he died, they say, with no one by.” But it was sensible for Lucrezia to avoid his fatal sickness, and stay alive for her daughter’s sake as well as for her own.

Artists should be judged by their influence as well as by their own work, and all Andrea’s pupils achieved eminence. In Bronzino (1981), Charles McCorquodale writes that Andrea not only had a successful career, but was also “idolised by the early Baroque in Florence. . . It was from del Sarto’s style that the initial phases of Florentine Mannerism stemmed, most notably in the work of his pupils Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.”

Though Vasari assumed a superior attitude, he could not possibly define and judge Andrea’s inner spirit, and could not know the difference between the art he actually produced and might possibly have achieved. Though Andrea did not reach the unattainable heights of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, none of them constrained by marriage, no other painter ever equaled their genius. So he was not, as we shall see, an artistic failure.

Giorgio Vasari (Shutterstock)

At a time when men were supposed to be dominant and women submissive, Vasari took literary revenge against his old teacher and his shrewish wife. Describing Andrea’s pupils, including himself, Vasari notes, “some stopped a little while and some longer, not through Andrea’s fault, but his wife’s, who tyrannously ordered them all about and rendered their lives a burden”. Since Lucrezia mistreated Andrea, she must also have cruelly mistreated his apprentices and used them like slaves. Vasari resented Andrea for failing to protect his apprentices and blamed him for tolerating Lucrezia’s abusive behaviour. But, like Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Andrea adored his adulterous beauty and was excited as well as tormented by sexual jealousy. He may even have been proud, as Bloom was, that many men desired the wife he possessed. Andrea needed both her inspiration as a model and her punishment as a wife to stimulate his perfect art.

II

In his 1855 poem “Andrea del Sarto (Called ‘The Faultless Painter’)”, Robert Browning accepts the truth of Vasari’s Life, his only source of information about the artist. He makes the intense conflicts between Andrea and Lucrezia, expressed in the painter’s dramatic monologue, the emotional core of his poem. Lucrezia never speaks or defends herself. Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi suffers monastic bondage, Andrea endures conjugal oppression. Vasari blames Andrea’s weak character for what he calls his failure, Browning emphasizes his cruel wife. Though perfection is certainly not a fault, the reference to senza errore in Browning’s subtitle became a negative term when artists valued impulse and spontaneity in the Romantic era. Browning liked imperfect work, and his poem Sordello is impenetrably rough-hewn.

Andrea del Sarto

Browning sympathises with the pathetic Andrea, who loved not wisely but too well. In the poem, as in Vasari, Andrea is constantly humiliated. He not only tolerates Lucrezia’s lovers, but also supports them. He slavishly submits to her demands, compromises his artistic integrity and turns out inferior work to pay her lover’s debts. He adores her, pleads with her and laments the loss of her love. He feels fettered and unable to realise his potential.

Andrea regrets that Lucrezia does not understand, “Nor care to understand about my art.” In a poignant moment that reveals her destructive indifference despite her modeling (and meddling) in his art, Andrea observes, “you don’t know how the others strive / To paint a little thing like that you smeared / Carelessly passing with your robes afloat.” Browning expresses one of his key concepts in the poem: the need to try for impossible goals — Virgil’s per aspera ad astra, through hardships to the stars — “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” He must “strive to do, and agonise to do” even if he is bound to fail. Andrea aspires to equal his artistic god and tells his wife, had you strengthened me and “given me soul, / We might have risen to Rafael, I and you!”

Andrea profoundly regrets his disastrous relations with the king of France. Despite his own lovesick decisions, he blames his failures on Lucrezia: “A good time, was it not, my kingly days? / And had you not grown restless . . . You called me, and I came home to your heart.” He admits that he betrayed the king and was misled by Lucrezia: “I took his coin, was tempted and complied, / And built this house and sinned.” Yet he still hopes in vain for the king’s forgiveness. He gave all his money to his wife, and feels terribly guilty about not supporting his aged and impoverished parents: “My father and my mother died of want.” 

Finally, Andrea is jealous of and devastated by her infidelity with her current lover, euphemistically called her relative, and addresses her in a series of sad and sceptical interrogatives: “That Cousin here again? he waits outside? / Must see you — you, and not with me? Those loans? / More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that?” She may have smiled gratefully for his money or slyly for deceiving him. The poem ends bitterly as Andrea hears the Cousin whistling to summon Lucrezia to their assignation. He accepts his rather operatic fate, still adores her and — imagining her orgasmic encounter — sends her off to see him with a feeble farewell: “Go, my love.”

Poets and scholars who came after Browning either ignored or questioned Vasari’s condemnation of Andrea, and provided a cultural and critical context for his poem. Algernon Swinburne’s wild but vaguely ecstatic chapter, “Andrea del Sarto” in Essays and Studies (1875), opposes Vasari’s negative view of the artist. He praises Andrea’s “lyric and elegiac loveliness,” “immortal spirit,” “bright and buoyant genius,” “exaltation and exuberance,” “fresh passion and imagination,” “charm of touch, sweetness of execution,” “dramatic delight in character and action,” and calls Lucrezia “a predominant and placid beauty”. Equally enthusiastic about Browning’s noblest poem, Swinburne, using a Resurrection metaphor, exclaims that “the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh”.

In his article blindly based on Vasari, The Influence of Andrea del Sarto’s Wife on His Art (1913), Ernest Jones, the biographer of Sigmund Freud, displays his abysmal ignorance of Renaissance art and culture, and offers an absurd psychoanalytic interpretation. Citing Andrea’s obsessive interest in food and tendency to do his own shopping, Jones concludes that Andrea was a suppressed homosexual, which explains his failure to attain the highest mastery in his art.

Two heavyweight German-speaking art historians made useful comments. In his Classic Art (1899), the Swiss scholar Heinrich Wölfflin at first concedes that “Vasari reproached Andrea for his tameness and timidity” and agrees that Andrea “seems to have had some [unidentified] defect in his moral constitution.” But he hastens to add that Andrea was one of “the best draughtsmen in Florence” and had “a ravishing sense of beauty.” In Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (1957), Walter Friedländer explains that Andrea reacted against Michelangelo and Rafael, and did not aspire to equal them: “in Florence Mannerism developed out of the Andrea del Sarto circle as an outspoken reaction against the beauty and repose of the Florentine High Renaissance”.

John Shearman, in a 1965 authoritative two-volume work on Andrea, based on extensive archival research, puts Vasari into proper perspective. Michelangelo admired Andrea and advised the fourteen-year-old Vasari to study with him, and Vasari was Andrea’s pupil for two years. Lucrezia, four years younger than Andrea, was widowed in 1516 and quickly married the 31-year-old artist in 1517, only a year before he went to France without his new wife. Her daughter Maria, by her first husband, was then five years old, and they had no children of their own.

Shearman, who describes Jones’ article as “comic literature on the arts,” rejects the “Romantic fallacy that the circumstances of an artist’s life are the key to the understanding of his work”. Most significantly, Shearman exposes the false assertions in Vasari’s indictment, and redeems the characters of both Andrea and Lucrezia. Shearman shows that Andrea did not marry beneath him, and “there is no sign that he lost any friends or professional reputation by marrying her”. He did not leave Lucrezia money to build a house. He “was not reduced to miserable circumstances by demands to subsidize his in-laws,” and he did not fail to support his own parents. Finally, “It is certain that Lucrezia did not abandon him on his deathbed; she was upstairs, waiting, where any normal man would have sent her in similar circumstances.” Shearman also notes that in 1568 Vasari deleted virtually all the scandal-mongering about Andrea and Lucrezia in the second, revised edition of the Lives.

Shearman concludes that Andrea’s “painting suggests a reticent and anti-sensationalist man with exceptional powers of concentration and exacting self-discipline,” and praises the “sheer beauty of his performance”. He also mentions that Andrea influenced Vasari’s “figure-style, motifs and compositional ideas”. Vasari, a follower of his idol Michelangelo, may have been trying to reject and disguise Andrea’s influence by criticising his old teacher.

In The High Renaissance and Mannerism (1967), Linda Murray puts Vasari’s and Browning’s “faultless painter” into proper perspective. Like Shearman, she defines Andrea’s impressive qualities and establishes his reputation as a major artist: “Andrea’s great gifts are such that he has been acclaimed as the perfect artist, the painter who never made a mistake. His impeccable draughtsmanship is full of feeling, his simple colour schemes are tender, his dazzling technique, whether in oil or fresco, make difficulties seem non-existent.”

Vasari’s contentious if unreliable story appealed to Browning. The poet was interested in marriage as a subject, especially when a wife actively humiliated her husband and degraded his work. By accepting and dramatising Vasari’s distorted view of Andrea in his poem, however, Browning continued to damage the reputation of a major artist. Andrea was not fully appreciated until scholars redeemed him in the mid-20th century.