Del Sarto's St. John the Baptist, in the same gallery, is also described by Mr. Taylor:

"The God-selected child, there should he stand, Alone and rapt, as from the world withdrawn To seek, amid the desolate land,

His Father's counsel: in one tender hand
A cross of reed, to lightly rest upon,
The other hand a Scrolled phylactery

Should, hanging, hold, as it the seed might be
Wherefrom the living Gospel shall expand."

One of Andrea's finest easel pictures is in the Uffizi, The Madonna with the Harpies, so called because of the harpies on the pedestal, in which he placed his own portrait as St. John, and his wife's as the Blessed Lady, of course. He was so enamoured of his wife, who was of inferior character, however, that he could never paint a picture without having in it her portrait, and when Francis I of France invited him to Paris to work for him, his wife Lucrezia, for a mere whim, wrote him to return to Florence, and when he did so, caused him to squander the money the king gave for his return to complete his contract, to the king's great disgust.

That was one instance only of the detriment she was to his artistic advancement and to his art, forcing him to rush through his work, for the money in it which she craved.

Robert Browning, through the mouth of Andrea del Sarto, speaking to his wife, in a poem of the same name, says:

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray

Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!

Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth
The Urbinate who died five years ago.
('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.)
Well, I can fancy how he did it all,

Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art-for it gives way:
That arm is wrongly put-and there again—
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,
Its body, so to speak: its soul is right,

He means right-that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it!
But all the play, the insight and the stretch-
Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?
Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,
We might have risen to Raphael, I and you!

Had the mouth there urged

God and the glory! never care for gain—
The present by the future what is that?
Live for fame, side by side with Angelo!
Raphael is waiting! up to God, all three!
I might have done it for you. So it seems.

*

What would one have?

In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more

chance,

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel's reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Angelo and me
To cover-the first three without a wife,
While I have mine! So-still they overcome
Because there's still Lucrezia,-as I choose."

As a copyist Andrea del Sarto fully demonstrated his title to Faultless, for one picture, now in the Pitti Gallery, he copied so perfectly, as to deceive the artist whose work it partly was. Raphael had painted a portrait of Leo X which was hung in the Medici palace in Florence, and when the Duke of Mantua, on his way to Rome to visit the succeeding Medician pope, Clement VII, saw the portrait, he desired greatly to possess it, and asked the pope for it. Clement, who, as Cardinal Giulio de 'Medici is represented in the group, granted him the picture and wrote to the Medici in Florence to pack it and ship it on to Mantua.

They were loth to part with it, yet unwilling to disobey the pope, so laid before Andrea del Sarto their dilemma. He immediately set to work secretly to copy the portrait, which was done so as to deceive Giulio Romano, a pupil of Raphael's who had helped him in the work, and also to deceive the Duke of Mantua who received it as the work of Raphael. Fortunately, when informed of the deception, he was not displeased, but exclaimed that he prized it no less,