Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Andrea del Sarto
Italian; 16th-century
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
...85%
The Lamentation of Christ. c1519. Oil on canvas
Compared with those of his Florentine contemporaries, there's uncommon verve in the actual surfaces of Andrea's canvases, which makes them more viscerally enthralling but also less perfect than much Renaissance art. The dragging and pooling of paint that creates the characteristic spectrality of his figures and their indefinite surroundings would be alien amongst the geometries of a composition by, say, Raphael, but Andrea's tendency towards general atmosphere over particular structure allows for — demands, even — his more equivocal touch. The arrangement of this picture is a little thick, gummy, but it's that very thickness that makes Mary's blue cloak weep and wail against Christ's pallor, that makes shapes and colors that ought to be incommensurable seem poised to fuse into a solid mass (the death-gray of the savior's throat with the angel's green robe; various flesh tones with the impossible pink that's wrapped around Jesus' waist). Still, there's a lack of control here — see the way the islands of exposed skin in the canvas's upper half struggle to communicate with each other those across oceans of vivid paint — that is not worth apologizing for. Andrea's single-figure compositions (I'm thinking especially of the one in Worcester) gain more and suffer less from his laxity. (TFS, 2025)