La Caridad

In 1518 the young French king François I, eager to draw Italian art to his court, invited Andrea del Sarto to France. This is one of the pictures Sarto made for him there: Charity, one of the Christian virtues, shown as a calm mother beset by three small children, one nursing, one clambering, one drowsing at her feet. Sarto was a Florentine with a reputation for painting without errors, and you can feel it in the balanced, unhurried arrangement. He did not stay long. Within a year he was back in Florence, and the story handed down by his biographer Vasari is that the king had trusted him with money to buy art in Italy, which Sarto is said to have spent instead on a house for himself and his wife.