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rather than that of the artist, as is commonly supposed. Lucrezia del Fede outlived her husband many years. Baldinucci, in his life of Empoli (vol. viii. p. 4), tells that, about the year 1569, that artist was one day painting in the court of the Servi, copying del Sarto's Nativity of the Virgin, when an old lady, on her way to mass, stopped by his easel to watch his work. She * See Vasari's " Life of Sogliani." LATEST PERIOD 55 soon fell into conversation, and pointing out one of the female figures in the frescoes, she told him it was the portrait of Andrea's wife ; and, warming as she spoke, she soon revealed herself as the widow of del Sarto. Lucrezia died in January 1570 at the age of eighty- seven, or thereabouts.* Many efforts have been made of late to whitewash her memory and to represent her as a model wife, and not at all the woman Vasari depicts. This, we take it, is a modern " direction," a part of the present tendency to overturn all accepted opinions ; and though she may not have been as bad as she has been painted, there is sufficient evidence to show that she was a woman of small aims, and of personal egoisms, which left her husband without that higher sympathy which his art demanded. Nor was she one who could put self aside, and while encouraging him to fulfil all