things, is Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur, painted, as
some have thought, to celebrate Lorenzo's return from Naples in 1480. It
is, then, rather as a royal gallery than as a museum that we must
consider the Galleria Palatina, a more splendid if less catholic Salon
Carre, the Tribuna of Italian painting. It is strange that, among all
the beautiful and splendid pictures with which the Grand Dukes
surrounded themselves, there is not one from the hand of Leonardo, nor
one that Michelangelo has painted. And then, of the many here that pass
under the name of Botticelli, only the Pallas and the Centaur in the
royal apartments seems to be really his; so that when we look for the
greatest pictures of the Florentine school, we must be content with the
strangely unsatisfactory work of Andrea del Sarto, often lovely enough
it is true, but as often insincere, shallow, not at one with itself, and
certainly a stranger here in Florence.

The work of Andrea del Sarto, as we are assured, might but for his
tragic story have been so splendid; but in truth that sentimental and
pathetic tale neither excuses nor explains his failure, if failure it
be. He is the first artist who has worked badly because he loved a
woman. He was born in 1456, and became the pupil of Piero di Cosimo.
There in that fantastic bottega he must have met Fra Bartolommeo, who
later influenced him so deeply. Nor was Michelangelo, or at least his
grand and tremendous art, without its effect upon one so easily moved,
so subject to every passing mood, as Andrea. Yet he never seems to have
expressed just himself, save in those tragic portraits of himself and of
his wife, of which there are three here in the Pitti (188, 280, 1176).
He has been called the faultless painter, and indeed he seems to be
incapable of fault, to be really a little effeminate, a little vague,
bewildered by the sculpture of Michelangelo, the confusion of art in
Florence, the advent of the colourists, of whom here in Tuscany he is
perhaps the chief. It is no intellectual passion you find in that soft,
troubled work, where from every picture Lucrezia del Fede looks out at
you, posing as Madonna or Magdalen or just herself, and even so,
discontented, unhappy, unsatisfactory because she is too stupid to be
happy at all. If she were Andrea's tragedy, one might think that even
without her his life could scarcely have been different. If we compare,
here in the Pitti Gallery, the two pictures of the Annun