Fra Bartolommeo
By Leader Scott
CHAPTER III.
SOCIAL LIFE AND MARRIAGE.
A.D. 1511-1516.
This chapter will speak of the man, and not of the artist. As it is now understood that history is not a dry record of battles and laws, but the story of the inner life of a people, so the biography of a painter ought not to consist wholly in a list and description of his works, but a picture of his life and inner mind, that we may know the character which prompted the works.
First, as to personal appearance. There are two portraits of Andrea del Sarto in his youth; one in the Duke of Northumberland’s collection represents him as a young man with long hair, and a black cap, writing at a table. It is painted in a soft, harmonious style, but not masterly as regards chiaroscuro. It might be by Francia Bigio, as it has something of the manner of his master, Albertinelli.
Another now in the Uffizi is a most life-like portrait of sombre colouring, but not highly finished. Here we have the same black cap and long hair; the dress is a painter’s blouse of a blue-grey, which well brings out the flesh tints. The face is intelligent, but not refined; the clear dark eyes bespeak the artist spirit, but the full mobile mouth tells the material nature of the man. In looking at this one can solve the riddle of the dissonance between his art and his life. As a young man Andrea was full of spirit; he loved lively society, and knew almost all the young artists who lived very much as students now. They met each other in the art schools, and dined and feasted together in the wine shops. Sometimes they formed private clubs, meeting in certain rooms for purposes of youthful merriment.
Of this kind was the “Society of the Cauldron” ("Società del Paiuolo”), held at the apartment of the eccentric sculptor, Rustici, which was in the same street as that of Andrea himself.
Sansovino, who also lived near, was not a member of this rollicking club; he was one of Andrea’s more serious friends, and served as companion when his most exalted moods were upon him. Perhaps Rustici’s rooms did not please Sansovino, for strange inmates were there–a hedgehog, an eagle, a talking raven, snakes and reptiles, in a kind of aquarium; besides all these gruesome familiar spirits, Rustici was addicted to necromancy. The Society of the Cauldron seems only a natural outgrowth from such a character. It consisted of twelve members, all artists, goldsmiths, or musicians, each of whom was allowed to bring four friends to the supper, and bound to provide a dish. Any two members bringing similar dishes were fined, but the droll part of it was that the suppers were eaten in a huge cauldron large enough to put table and chairs into; the handle served as an arched chandelier, the table was on a lift, and when one course was finished it disappeared from their midst, and descended to be replenished. As for the viands, the sculptors displayed their talents in moulding classical subjects in pastry, and turning boiled fowls into figures of Ulysses and Laertes. The architects built up temples and palaces of jellies, cakes, and sausages; the goldsmith, Robetta, produced an anvil and accoutrements made of a calf’s head, the painters treated roast pig to represent a scullery-maid spinning.
Andrea del Sarto built up the model of the Baptistery with all kinds of eatables, with a reading desk of veal, and book with letters inlaid with truffles, at which the choristers were roast thrushes with open beaks, while the canons were pigeons in red mantles of beetroot–an idea more droll than reverential.
After this, in 1512, another club, called that of the “Trowel,” was instituted, of which Andrea was not a member, but was chosen as an associate. The first supper was arranged by Giuliano Bugiardini, and was held on the aja or threshing floor of S. Maria Nuova, where the bronze gates of the Baptistery had been cast.
In this no two members were allowed to wear the same style of dress under penalty of a fine. The members were in two ranks, the “lesser" and the “greater,” a parody on the guilds of the city. They were shown the plan of a building, and the “greater” members, furnished with trowels, were obliged to build it in edibles, the “lesser” acting as hodmen, and bringing materials. Pails of ricotta or goat’s milk cheese served for mortar, grated cheese for sand, sugar plums for gravel, cakes and pastry for bricks, the basement was of meats, the pillars fowls or sausages.
Some suppers were classical scenes, others allegorical representations, always in the same edible form. We can imagine the wit which sparkled round these strange tables, the jokes of the artists, the songs of the musicians. Andrea del Sarto is said to have recited an heroi-comic poem in six cantos called the “Battle of the frogs and mice.” Biadi gives it entire; it seems a kind of satire on Rustici’s tastes, with perhaps a hit at the government, and shows no lack of wit of rather unrefined style; but the authorship is not proved. Some say Ottaviano de Medici assisted Andrea in it.
It would have been well for Andrea if this innocent jollity had sufficed for him, but unfortunately he admired a woman whose beauty was greater than her merits. Probably he began by mere artistic appreciation of her personal charms, for she sat to him for the Madonna of the Visitation, which was painted in 1514, two years before their marriage. This Lucrezia della Fede was the wife of a hatter who lived in Via San Gallo. Her husband dying after a short illness, Andrea del Sarto married her, and whatever were her faults, she retained his life-long love. Biadi and Reumont give the date 26th of December, 1512, as that of the death of her husband, but Signor Milanesi, from more authentic sources, proves it to have been in 1516.
A great deal has been said and written of the evil influence this woman had on him, and his very house bears an inscription recording his fame together with “affanni domestici,” but it would seem that posterity has taken for truth more than the facts of the time imply. That she was proud, haughty, exacting, and not of a high moral nature, that she was selfish, and begrudged his helping his own family, her every action proves. That her manners were not conciliating to the pupils is possible, perhaps their manners savoured too much of familiarity for a woman who believed in her own charms; but that she was faithless, which her biographers assert on the strength of Vasari’s phrase, “that Andrea was tormented by jealousy,” there is literally nothing to show.
In the first place Vasari–who was one of the scholars she offended and put down–gives vent to his private pique in his first edition, and in the second, which only contains a slight mention of her, omits almost all he had previously said. Now, if the first assertions were true why should he retract them? Secondly, the sixteenth century was an age of license in writing and speaking, and had any immoralities been laid to her charge, not a biographer would have scrupled to particularize them; but no! her name is never mentioned, except with her husband’s, even by her greatest enemies, who say she was as haughty as she was beautiful. Thirdly, a faithless woman could never have kept her husband’s devoted love, and had she been so, would that affectionate though exaggerated letter of hers, recalling him from France, have been written? That a man who thinks his wife the most lovely creature living may be tormented with jealousy without wrong doing on her part is more than possible.
Let us then place Lucrezia’s character where it ought to stand in Andrea del Sarto’s life–as a powerful influence, lowering his moral nature, weaning him from his duties as a son and brother, by fixing all his care and affection on herself; she, however, not allowing her own family to be losers by her marriage, although causing him to slight his own. Even this much-spoken-of neglect of his own family seems disproved by his will, which, after a very little more than her own dot left to his wife, makes his brother and niece heirs of all his estate.
Except that she cared more for her own pleasure than his true advancement, she was not any great hindrance to his artistic career; he painted an incredible number of pictures, and she was willing to sit for him over and over again. Indeed if she were his model for all the Madonnas in which her features are recognisable, she must have had either inexhaustible patience or great love for the artist.
In fact she was thoroughly selfish; as long as she reaped the benefit of his work she furthered his art; where she was left out of his consideration he must be brought back to her side at any sacrifice to him. This is not the stuff of which an artist’s wife ought to be made; the influence of a strong-willed selfish nature on his weak and material one was not good, and his morale became lowered.
He felt this deterioration less than his friends felt it for him; even Vasari says that “though he lived in torment, he yet accounted it a high pleasure.” It was one of those unions in which the man gives everything, and the woman receives and allows every sacrifice. Her family were kept at his expense, her daughter loved as his own, and if she were haughty or exacting, he suffered with a Socratic patience, thinking life with her a privilege.
It is to be supposed that a member of the societies of the Cauldron and the Trowel would appreciate good living. He was so devoted to the pleasures of the table that he went to market himself early every morning and came home laden with delicacies. [Footnote: Biadi, Notixie inedite, &c., chap. xix. p. 62.] A curious confirmation of this is to be found in his house, the dining-room of which is beautifully frescoed, the arched roof in Raphaelesque scrolls and grotesques; while the lunettes of one wall have two large pictures, one of a woman roasting birds over a fire, the other of a servant preparing the table for dinner. This love of good living, however, in the end shortened his life, according to Biadi.
After his marketing was over he turned his attention to art, going to his fresco painting followed by his scholars, or superintending their work in the “bottega.” He was always a kind and thorough master, his manner just and fatherly.
Sometimes he and Sansovino or other friends lounged away an hour in the neighbouring shop of Nanni Unghero, where their mutual friend, Niccolò Tribolo, did all the hard work, fetching and carrying blocks and saws grumblingly. Tribolo often begged Sansovino to take him as his pupil, which he did afterwards, and he became a famous sculptor. One of Andrea’s acquaintances was Baccio Bandinelli, who, as he thought he could equal Michelangelo in sculpture, imagined that only a knowledge of Andrea del Sarto’s method of colouring was necessary to enable him to surpass him in painting. To gain this knowledge he proposed to sit to Andrea for his portrait. His friend, discovering his motive, succeeded in frustrating it by mixing a quantity of colours in seeming confusion on his palette, and yet getting from this chaos exactly the tints he required. So Baccio never rivalled his friend in colouring after all, not being able to understand his method.
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