Madonna of the Harpies

Andrea del Sarto - Madonna of the Harpies - 1517 - Oil on wood, 208 x 178 cm - (83.2 x 71.2 in.) Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (click photo for larger image)Perhaps the most famous work of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) is the altarpiece painted for the nuns of San Francesco dei Macci, known as the “Madonna of the Harpies”. The work shows St John the Evangelist and St Francis on either side of the Madonna and Child, on a high polygonal pedestal, decorated at the corners with the so-called Harpies. In the center, beneath the artist's signature, are the opening words of a hymn to Our Lady of the Assumption. This painting is truly a milestone in the career of Andrea del Sarto, and bears witness to the level of maturity of the most significant artistic experiences of the early 16th century: the "atmospheric" painting of Leonardo, the meditation recently infused with a new freshness in the "grandiose" manner of Michelangelo, the elegant and solemn classicism of Fra Bartolomeo endowed with a new intensity of color after his stay in Venice, and the experience of Raphael's work in Rome. These are all motifs that come together in a single stylistic solution, the greatness of which was immediately recognized in Florence and elsewhere. The figure of the Madonna, wrought into a composed chiasmus (crosswise arrangement) in order to balance the weight of the Child, lights up the center of the picture with the intense rose color of her robe, tempered by harmony with the pale blue of her mantle, and with the brilliant yellow of the light fabric draped over her shoulders, beneath the beautiful drapery of the white veil covering her head. For centuries—ever since a judgment by Vasari—the work was considered to be the prototype of classicism instilled into religious subjects, a refined synthesis of Leonardesque `sfumato', Raphaelesque balance, and plastic monumentality in the style of Michelangelo. Andrea del Sarto, who Vasari dubbed the "painter without errors", gives us here a typical example of intellectual religiousness of clear neo-Platonic derivation.