Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/211

Rh struggling mightily meanwhile to repress the intensity of his emotions. San Lorenzo, being still very young, is listening to the discourse of the other Saints with the semblance of respectful attention, and appears to yield to the authority of his elders.

Beneath this group are two figures kneeling, one of whom, a Magdalen with most beautiful draperies, is the portrait of Andrea’s wife, indeed he rarely painted the countenance of a woman in any place that he did not avail himself of the features of his wife; and if at any time he took his model from any other face, there was always a resemblance to hers in the painting, not only because he had this woman constantly before him and depicted her so frequently, but also, and what is still more, because he had her lineaments engraven on his heart; it thus happens that almost all his female heads have a certain something which recalls that of his wife.

The second of the four figures is a San Sebastiano, he is entirely undraped, with his back turned to the spectator, and does not appear to be merely part of a painted surface, but rather seems to all who behold him to be in truth a living and breathing figure. This work, among all the many paintings in oil that were executed by Andrea, has ever been held by artists to be the best; the figures display much thought in their admirable proportions, and in a certain decorum and propriety manifest in the expression of their countenances; the heads of the young have the softness proper to their age; there is force and perhaps hardness in the old; while those of middle age exhibit a medium between both, and partake of the qualities of each. The work is in a word, most beautiful in all its parts; it is now in the church of San Jacopo-trafossi at the corner of the Alberti, with others by the hand of the same master.

While Andrea was thus labouring over these works in