and oils, disposition of draperies, and feeling for light and shadow, he was above criticism.  As a colourist he went further and produced more beautiful effects than any Florentine before him.  His silver-grey harmonies and liquid blendings of hues cool, yet lustrous, have a charm peculiar to himself alone.  We find the like nowhere else in Italy.  And yet Andrea del Sarto cannot take rank among the greatest Renaissance painters.  What he lacked was precisely the most precious gift—­inspiration, depth of emotion, energy of thought.  We are apt to feel that even his best pictures were designed with a view to solving an aesthetic problem.  Very few have the poetic charm belonging to the “S.  John” of the Pitti or the “Madonna” of the Tribune.  Beautiful as are many of his types, like the Magdalen in the large picture of the “Pieta"[400] we can never be sure that he will not break the spell by forms of almost vulgar mediocrity.  The story that his wife, a worthless woman, sat for his Madonnas, and the legends of his working for money to meet pressing needs, seem justified by numbers of his paintings, faulty in their faultlessness and want of spirit.  Still, after making these deductions, we must allow that Andrea del Sarto not unworthily represents the golden age at Florence.  There is no affectation, no false taste, no trickery in his style.  His workmanship is always solid; his hand unerring.  If Nature denied him the soul of a poet, and the stern will needed for escaping from the sordid circumstances of his life, she gave him some of the highest qualities a painter can desire—­qualities of strength, tranquillity, and thoroughness, that in the decline of the century ceased to exist outside Venice.

Among Del Sarto’s followers it will be enough to mention Franciabigio, Vasari’s favourite in fresco painting, Rosso de’ Rossi, who carried the Florentine manner into France, and Pontormo, the masterly painter of portraits.[401] In the historical pictures of these men, whether sacred or secular, it is clear how much was done for Florentine art by Fra Bartolommeo and Del Sarto independently of Michael Angelo and Lionardo.  Angelo Bronzino, the pupil of Pontormo, is chiefly valuable for his portraits.  Hard and cold, yet obviously true to life, they form a gallery of great interest for the historian of Duke Cosimo’s reign.  His frescoes and allegories illustrate the defects that have been pointed out in those of Raphael’s and Buonarroti’s imitators.[402] Want of thought and feeling, combined with the presumptuous treatment of colossal and imaginative subjects, renders these compositions inexpressibly chilling.  The psychologist, who may have read a poem from Bronzino’s pen, will be inclined to wonder how far this barren art was not connected with personal corruption.[403] Such speculations are, however, apt to be misleading.