Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/376

324 about to attack the convent, but when they entered the refectory they paused awe-struck before Andrea's painting, and retired without doing any further damage.

As years went by, Andrea's style became more and more artificial. He repeated his old compositions, and painted one picture after another with the same marvellous facility, in the same mannered style. In the Virgin-Saints at Pisa, in the Assumptions and Holy Family of the Pitti, we see the same heavy masses of draperies, the same fair women with soulless faces and insipid expression. Even his drawing became academic and conventional, and his once soft and brilliant colouring gave place to monotonous greyness. Here and there we find a touch of the old grace, as, for instance, in the fascinating babies from the large altar-piece which he painted, in 1528, for the hermitage on the heights of Vallombrosa, or the delightful children wearing the white hoods of the S. Jacopo's Penitents on the processional banner of the Confraternity in the Uffizi.

One phase of art in which Andrea del Sarto excelled was that of portrait-painting. The refined and thoughtful head of the Sculptor in the National Gallery is an excellent example of his direct and simple interpretation of character, while in the successive portraits of himself and his wife he has left us a pathetic record of his own history. Again and again he has painted this beautiful Lucrezia whom he loved too well for his own happiness. In the Uffizi picture we see her clad in a blue robe, holding an open volume of Petrarch's Sonnets in her hand; in the later portrait at Berlin she wears a more matronly