Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/335

Rh S A R S A R 315 Vienna, where the emperor Joseph II. received him with marked favour, and where he made the acquaintance of Mozart. He reached St Petersburg in 1785, and at once took the direction of the opera, for which he composed many new pieces, besides some very striking sacred music, including a Te Deum for the victory at Otchakoff, in which he introduced the firing of real cannon. He remained in Russia seventeen years; but by the end of that time his health was so broken by the climate that he solicited permission to return. The empress and her successor Paul I. had then been some time dead ; but the emperor Alexander dismissed Sarti with all possible honour, and he quitted the country in 1802 with a liberal pension and letters of nobility granted to him by the empress Catherine. His most successful operas in Russia were Armida and Olega, for the latter of which the empress herself wrote the libretto. Sarti did not live to reach Italy, but died at Berlin, July 28, 1802. There can be no doubt that Cherubim owed much of his stupen- dous learning to the judicious teaching of Sarti, who was an accomplished mathematician and physicist as well as a musician, and whose works, if they lack the impress of true genius, show extraordinary talent, and are marked throughout by faultless taste, combined with technical skill of the highest order. SARTO, ANDREA DEL (1487-1531). This celebrated painter of the Florentine school was born in Gual- fonda, Florence, in 1487, or perhaps 1486, his father Agnolo being a tailor (sarto) : hence the nickname by which the son is constantly designated. The family, though of no distinction, can be traced back into the 14th century. Vannucchi has constantly been given as the sur- name, according to some modern writers, without any authority, but it seems rather difficult to accept this dictum. There were four other children of the marriage. In 1494 Andrea was put to work under a goldsmith. This occupation he disliked. He took to drawing from his master's models, and was soon transferred to a skilful woodcarver and inferior painter named Gian Barile, with whom he remained until 1498. Barile, though a coarse- grained man enough, would not stand in the way of the advancement of his promising pupil, so he recommended him to Piero di Cosimo as draughtsman and colourist. Piero retained Andrea for some years, allowing him to study from the famous cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Finally Andrea agreed with his friend Francia Bigio, who was somewhat his senior, that they would open a joint shop ; at a date not precisely defined they took a lodging together in the Piazza del Grano. Their first work in partnership may probably have been the Baptism of Christ, done for the Florentine Com- pagnia dello Scalzo, a performance of no great merit, the beginning of a series, all the extant items of which are in monochrome chiaroscuro. Soon afterwards the partnership was dissolved. From 1509 to 1514 the brotherhood of the Servi employed Andrea, as well as Francia Bigio and Andrea Feltrini, the first-named undertaking in the portico of the Annunziata three frescos illustrating the life of the founder of the order, S. Filippo Benizzi. He executed them in a few months, being endowed by nature with remarkable readiness and certainty of hand, and unhesitat- ing firmness in his work, although in the general mould of his mind he was timid and diffident. The subjects are the Saint Sharing his Cloak with a Leper, Cursing some Gamblers, and Restoring a Girl possessed with a Devil. The second and third works excel the first, and are impulsive and able performances. These paintings met with merited applause, and gained for their author the pre-eminent title " Andrea senza errori " (Andrew the unerring), the correctness of the contours being parti- cularly admired. After these subjects the painter pro- ceeded with two others the Death of St Philip, and the Children Cured by Touching his Garment, all the five works being completed before the close of 1510. The youth of twenty-three was already in technique about the best fresco-painter of central Italy, barely rivalled by Raphael, who was the elder by four years. Michelangelo's Sixtine frescos were then only in a preliminary stage. Andrea always worked in the simplest, most typical, and most trying method of fresco that of painting the thing once and for all, without any subsequent dry-touching. He now received many commissions. The brotherhood of the Servi engaged him to do two more frescos in the Annunziata at a higher price ; he also painted, towards 1512, an Annunciation in the monastery of S. Gallo. The "Tailor's Andrew" appears to have been an easy- going plebeian, to whom a modest position in life and scanty gains were no grievances. As an artist he must have known his own value ; but he probably rested content in the sense of his superlative powers as an executant, and did not aspire to the rank of a great inventor or leader, for which, indeed, he had no vocation. He led a social sort of life among his compeers of the art, was intimate with the sculptor Rustici, and joined a jolly dining-club at his house named the Company of the Kettle, also a second club named the Trowel. At one time, Francia Bigio being then the chairman, of the Kettle-men, Andrea recited, and is by some regarded as having composed, a comic epic, " The Battle of the Mice and Frogs" a rechauffe", as one may surmise, of the Greek Batrachomyomachia, popularly ascribed to Homer. He fell in love with Lucrezia (del Fede), wife of a hatter named Carlo Recanati ; the hatter dying opportunely, the tailor's son married her on 26th December 1512. She was a very handsome woman, and has come down to us treated with great suavity in many a picture of her lover- husband, who constantly painted her as a Madonna and otherwise; and even in painting other women he made them resemble Lucrezia in general type. She has been much less gently handled by Vasari and other biographers. Vasari, who was at one time a pupil of Andrea, describes her as faithless, jealous, overbearing, and vixenish with the apprentices. She lived to a great age, surviving her second husband 40 years. By 1514 Andrea had finished his last two frescos in the court of the Servi, than which none of his works was more admired the Nativity of the Virgin, which shows the influence of Leonardo, Domenico Ghirlandajo, and Fra Bartolommeo, in effective fusion, and the Procession of the Magi, intended as an amplification of a work by Baldovinetti ; in this fresco is a portrait of Andrea him- self. He also executed at some date a much-praised Head of Christ over the high altar. By November 1515 he had finished at the Scalzo the allegory of Justice, and the Baptist Preaching in the Desert, followed in 1517 by John Baptizing, and other subjects. Before the end of 1516 a Pieta of his composition, and afterwards a Madonna, were sent to the .French Court. These were received with applause ; and the art-loving monarch Francis I. suggested in 1518 that Andrea should come to Paris. He journeyed thither towards June of that year, along with his pupil Andrea Sguazzella, leaving his wife in Florence, and was very cordially received, and for the first and only time in his life was handsomely remunerated. Lucrezia, however, wrote urging his return to Italy. The king assented, but only on the understanding that his absence from France was to be short ; and he entrusted Andrea with a sum of money to be expended in purchas- ing works of art for his royal patron. The temptation of having a goodly amount of pelf in hand proved too much for Andrea's virtue. He spent the king's money and some of his own in building a house for himself in Flor-