Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530)
Ritratto d’uomo (Portrait of a Man)
1528–1529
Oil on canvas, transferred from wood, 66.7 x 50.5 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This is probably the “natural seeming and very beautiful” portrait of a canon from Pisa Cathedral that the biographer Giorgio Vasari describes in his Life of Andrea del Sarto. The canon was a close friend of the artist during his last years and helped him to secure his last commissions. Holding tightly to a small prayer book, or Book of Hours, the sitter steadies his gaze on the viewer. Sarto was the leading painter in early sixteenth-century Florence, known for his engaging naturalism and technical brilliance. The portrait was painted not long before Sarto died of the plague in 1530. (MET)