Commented Works: The Virgin and Child between Saint Matthew and an Angel, by Andrea del Sarto

Today I am going to talk about this painting by András the Painter also known as the Madonna of the Ladder He painted it for a banker the banker Jacopi of Florence It was in the collection of the Duke of Mantua It was also in the collection of King Charles I of England where Colonel Whetton bought it He also passed to the Marquis of Haro who gave it to Philip IV and Velázquez placed it in the Sacristy of the Escorial It has been at the Prado Museum since 1819 I think it is the masterpiece of Andrea del Sarto He is a painter with very high quality from his earliest works but he was also a very inconsistent painter leaving many paintings unfinished Next to the Madonna of the Arpías I would say this is her best work András el Sarto was also at the court of Francis I between 1518 and 1519 at the same time that Leonardo was there And he works in Florence surrounded by great geniuses I had to live with Leonardo Michelangelo Fra Bartolomeo In Venice they were also working a bit earlier Giorgione Titian He lived in an era of true giants and measured himself against them If we look at the works of András the Painter It is true that they are sending us many ways of working not so much from the Florentines as from the Venetians It is a moment when there is a change in painting A first change had occurred in Florentine painting at the beginning of the 15th century In which the human being is already trying to integrate with their environment At that moment perspective is more frequently relied upon But a century later what they do is recover more the concept of the past In a setting without sharp lines an environment that surrounds the forms It is a more Venetian concept but we do see that there are Florentine painters who are accepting or adhering to this concept because it suits them very well To represent what they want to represent In this work what we can see is the working process that Petrarca had already defined which was the painter without errors When we look at the underlying drawing we think he is not an error-free painter since we see the large number of changes doubts and corrections What he does during the creative process However Petrarch says when he talks about error-free creative processes It's not that they don't occur during the process but rather that they result in a perfect image A surface image without flaws which I truly believe is what we are seeing in this work They also relate it to the concept of difficulty at is not what can be understood as depicting bodies in very forced positions or in difficult postures but rather in the art of hiding the art What is the Ciceronian concept of Cancelare All that process that has led us to create a masterpiece We have hidden it so that it seems like it cost us nothing It has been very easy to do which is what Castiglione later defines as sprezzatura We see that this painting gave Andrea del Sarto many problems She worked with cardboard cutouts drawing the composition which she then transferred He also worked with partial figure cutouts We currently have four figures of the Virgin and two of the Child which are reused in other paintings What we see in the underlying drawing and do not see on the surface We see it on the surface of other paintings he was working on at that time So it gives the impression that he has three paintings in progress and is trying out different solutions to see which works best Andrea del Sarto focuses on studying mainly the movements and attitudes and also a certain dematerialization of forms and outlines Nature has no sharp contours Bocchi when speaking of the art of Andrea del Sarto To define it very well by saying that the forms in their paintings communicate with each other That often we don't know where one ends and the other begins We need to get close to see it because from a distance it gives us a much more integrated image But if we look at the Virgin's hands the Child and her face there are actually no perfectly defined profiles We see on the surface especially on the body of the Child some grayish shadows that envelop the entire figure They are gray shadows throughout the painting They are not painted on top but come from below which is what we saw in the drawing He once he had drawn this chaos of lines that we see What he did was use what Cennino Cennini calls a tempera wash They were flat areas that we initially thought were a single color they were grayish Then we have seen that they have a color ranging from brown to blac And it plays with them to create shadows or darker or warmer or cooler He applies them to distribute the shadows and lights and on the other hand to organize all that chaos he has at a given moment And be able to define a more concrete image to work with And they also use them to erase We saw on the angel's face that it had some brushstrokes erasing a first profile But then he uses them to add vibrancy he doesn't hide them so that it gives us the feeling that those meats are vibrating of the arms if we look at the child's arm at with infrared reflectography we can see that it has been moved out of position which leaves it a little on the surface and gives the impression of a slight sequence That is what we have also seen before in Tintoretto Painters who use those working sequences on the surface to create depth Basari was his student and says he spent a lot of time studying the cards that were displayed in the Pope's Room there in Florence The sketches that Miguel Angel had made for the Battle of Castina and Leonardo for the Battle of Anghiari which we thought were studies And indeed this type of grays in Andrea del Salto's art is of great importance First because she uses them to give a sculptural aspect to her underlying drawing Get that relief from below without having to reproduce it on the surface The last concept we will mention regarding the painting is the concept of darkness This mysterious varnish that Apélez had also discovered With which he covered his paintings once finished to protect them and so that the very vid colors would not offend the eye Everything was about mitigation softening the very vid colors wrapping the image with slightly dark and vibrant bases so that the so-called tonal painting is achieved It is a tone that envelops the entire image and is what also makes it It seems as if the bodies are surrounded by air which is what they called the Aristotelian diaphanous The diaphanous is the air that surrounds the figures and also counteracts their possible sharpness If we look at each other we are not clear something is interposing between us and the observer and that is what they are trying to represent in this painting Then we see that he is a painter who was very present in his time closely related to everything that is being discussed to everything that is being painted And above all I think it's someone who dares to give color to Leonardo's ideas something that Leonardo himself didn't dare to give color to for example Perhaps because it did not interest him to the Adoration of the Magi or to Saint Jerome Andrea del Salto does take up that torch I am going to do all this formal exercise and experimentation that Leonardo is doing But I'm also going to give it color And he did it the way we are seeing here