Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/379

1531] sum for which he asked—"una miseria," as Vasari says!

When Florence was taken by the Spaniards, the plague broke out in many parts of the city, and Andrea del Sarto was one of its first victims. He breathed his last on the 22nd of January, 1531, at the age of forty-five, deserted even by his wife, who fled in terror from the house and left him to die alone. Yet his devotion to her had never altered, and in a will which he made four years before his death, he left all his property to his dear wife, "la mia diletta domina," and even remembered his step-daughter Maria. Lucrezia survived her husband forty years, and died in January, 1571. One day in the winter of 1570, when the artist Jacopo da Empoli was copying Andrea del Sarto's Birth of the Virgin in the court of the Annunziata, an old woman of eighty stopped to speak to him on her way to mass, and pointing to the figure of the handsome young matron in the picture, told him that this was her portrait, and that she herself was Lucrezia del Fede, the widow of the artist who painted the fresco. She had vexed him in his life-time and abandoned him on his death-bed, but it was still her greatest pride to remember that she had been the wife of the famous master—"Andrea senza errori."