Of a total surface of 1,533,760 acres, 982,635 acres in the department are arable, 198,517 underwood, 190,176 in meadows and grass, 42,000 in moors, and 22,284 in vineyards. In 1881 the live stock comprised 61,400 horses, 6524 asses or mules, 182,195 cattle, 49,373 sheep (wool-clip 83 to 84 tons), 79,737 pigs, 24,369 goats, 12,898 hives (76 tons of honey, 21½ tons wax). Poultry (capons, geese, &c.) form one of the most remunerative products of the department, which sends yearly to Paris 250,000 fowls and 100,000 geese, and consumes or disposes of 10,000,000 eggs. The horses are, like those of Perche (percherons), famous for speed combined with strength. There are three distinct districts :—the corn lands to the north of the Sarthe and the Huisne; the moorlands, partly planted with pine, between those two streams and the Loir; and the wine-growing country to the south of the Loir. In 1883 the grain crop yielded 2,813,387 bushels of wheat, 951,039 of meslin, 714,248 of rye, 2,317,760 of barley, 1,993,049 of oats, 30,880 of maize, and 59,680 of buckwheat; and there were 9,536,312 bushels of potatoes and 92,521 of beans, pease, &c., 81,664 tons of beetroot, 4794 tons of hemp, and 6 of flax. In 1884 cider was produced to the extent of 15,473,414 gallons (average quantity per annum in previous years 8,628,444 gallons), and wine to 4,347,134 gallons

(average quantity 3,883,330). Fodder was grown to the amount of 381,110 tons; and there were considerable supplies of chestnuts and hazel nuts—Château du Loir being the principal market for the former. From the forests, which consist mainly of oaks, witch-elms, chestnut-trees, pines, and beeches, material is drawn to the value of £140,000. The agriculture of the district has made great progress through the opening up of roads, improvements, draining, and irrigation. Besides mines of anthracite and coal (21,205 tons in 1882), iron-ore, marble, freestone, slate, millstones, clay, marl, lime, tuffeau (a kind of white chalky tuff), magnesia, and peat are all worked. The staple industry is the weaving of hemp and flax (3395 spindles, 4400 looms, 400 being power-looms). The cotton manufacture ranks next (8700 spindles, 185 looms, of which 100 are power-looms), while the woollen manufacture employs only 350 spindles and 161 looms. In the paper-mills 569 workmen are engaged, and the value of the paper and cardboard produced was £180,880 in 1881. Iron-foundries, copper and bell foundries, potteries, tile-works, glass-works and stained glass manufactories, currierics, engine and carriage factories, wire-gauze factories, flourmills, and distilleries are also carried on; and altogether about 256 steam-engines with 2480 horse-power are employed in those establishments. The commerce of the department is facilitated by 99 miles of navigable river (Sarthe and Loir), 250 miles of national roads, 6707 miles of other roads, and 352 miles of railway.

With its 438,917 inhabitants (1881) Sarthe has exactly the average density of population in France. From 1801 (380,821) to 1866 (465,615) the number was on the increase, but since that date there has been a decline. The department forms the diocese of Le Mans, has its court of appeal at Angers, and its university authorities at Caen, and constitutes part of tho territory of the fourth corps d'armée with its headquarters at Le Mans. The four arrondissements are named from Le Mans, the chief town; LaFlèche (9424 inhabitants), famous for its prytanée militaire; Mamers (6070 inhabitants); and St Calais (3600). There are 33 cantons and 387 communes. Sablé (6000 inhabitants) contains a castle built for Colbert by Mansart; and hard by was the celebrated Benedictine abbey of Solesmes.

In 1784 Sarti was invited by the empress Catherine II. to St Petersburg. On his way thither he stopped at Vienna, where the emperor Joseph II. received him with marked favour, and where he made the acquaintance of Mozart. He reached St Petersburg in 1785, and at once took the direction of the opera, for which he composed many new pieces, besides some very striking sacred music, including a Te Deum for the victory at Otchakoff, in which he introduced the firing of real cannon. He remained in Russia seventeen years; but by the end of that time his health was so broken by the climate that he solicited permission to return. The empress and her successor Paul I. had then been some time dead; but the emperor Alexander dismissed Sarti with all possible honour, and he quitted the country in 1802 with a liberal pension and letters of nobility granted to him by the empress Catherine. His most successful operas in Russia were Armida and Olega, for the latter of which the empress herself wrote the libretto. Sarti did not live to reach Italy, but died at Berlin, July 28, 1802.

There can be no doubt that Cherubini owed much of bis stupendous learning to tho judicious teaching of Sarti, who was an accomplished mathematician and physicist as well as a musician, and whose works, if they lack the impress of true genius, show extraordinary talent, and are marked throughout by faultless taste, combined with technical skill of the highest order.

Children Cured by Touching his Garment,—all the five works being completed before the close of 1510. The youth of twenty-three was already in technique about the best fresco-painter of central Italy, barely rivalled by Raphael, who was the elder by four years. Michelangelo’s Sixtine frescos were then only in a preliminary stage. Andrea always worked in the simplest, most typical, and most trying method of fresco—that of painting the thing once and for all, without any subsequent dry-touching. He now received many commissions. The brotherhood of the Servi engaged him to do two more frescos in the Annunziata at a higher price; he also painted, towards 1512, an Annunciation in the monastery of S. Gallo.

The “Tailor’s Andrew” appears to have been an easygoing plebeian, to whom a modest position in life and scanty gains were no grievances. As an artist he must have known his own value; but he probably rested content in the sense of his superlative powers as an executant, and did not aspire to the rank of a great inventor or leader, for which, indeed, he had no vocation. He led a social sort of life among his compeers of the art, was intimate with the sculptor Rustici, and joined a jolly dining-club at his house named the Company of the Kettle, also a second club named the Trowel. At one time, Francia Bigio being then the chairman of the Kettle-men, Andrea recited, and is by some regarded as having composed, a comic epic, “The Battle of the Mice and Frogs”—a rechauffé, as one may surmise, of the Greek Batrachomyomachia, popularly ascribed to Homer. He fell in love with Lucrezia (del Fede), wife of a hatter named Carlo Recanati; the hatter dying opportunely, the tailor’s son married her on 26th December 1512. She was a very handsome woman, and has come down to us treated with great suavity in many a picture of her lover-husband, who constantly painted her as a Madonna and otherwise; and even in painting other women he made them resemble Lucrezia in general type. She has been much less gently handled by Vasari and other biographers. Vasari, who was at one time a pupil of Andrea, describes her as faithless, jealous, overbearing, and vixenish with the apprentices. She lived to a great age, surviving her second husband 40 years.

By 1514 Andrea had finished his last two frescos in the court of the Servi, than which none of his works was more admired—the Nativity of the Virgin, which shows the influence of Leonardo, Domenico Ghirlandajo, and Fra Bartolommeo, in effective fusion, and the Procession of the Magi, intended as an amplification of a work by Baldovinetti; in this fresco is a portrait of Andrea himself. He also executed at some date a much-praised Head of Christ over the high altar. By November 1515 he had finished at the Scalzo the allegory of Justice, and the Baptist Preaching in the Desert,—followed in 1517 by John Baptizing, and other subjects. Before the end of 1516 a Pietà of his composition, and afterwards a Madonna, were sent to the French Court. These were received with applause; and the art-loving monarch Francis I. suggested in 1518 that Andrea should come to Paris. He journeyed thither towards June of that year, along with his pupil Andrea Sguazzella, leaving his wife in Florence, and was very cordially received, and for the first and only time in his life was handsomely remunerated. Lucrezia, however, wrote urging his return to Italy. The king assented, but only on the understanding that his absence from France was to be short; and he entrusted Andrea with a sum of money to be expended in purchasing works of art for his royal patron. The temptation of having a goodly amount of pelf in hand proved too much for Andrea’s virtue. He spent the king’s money and some of his own in building a house for himself in Flor ence. This necessarily brought him into bad odour with Francis, who refused to be appeased by some endeavours which the painter afterwards made to reingratiate himself. No serious punishment, however, and apparently no grave loss of professional reputation befell the defaulter.

In 1520 he resumed work in Florence, and executed the Faith and Charity in the cloister of Lo Scalzo. These were succeeded by the Dance of the Daughter of Herodias, the Beheading of the Baptist, the Presentation of his Head to Herod, an allegory of Hope, the Apparition of the Angel to Zacharias (1523), and the monochrome of the Visitation. This last was painted in the autumn of 1524, after Andrea had returned from Luco in Mugello,—to which place an outbreak of plague in Florence had driven him, his wife, his step-daughter, and other relatives. In 1525 he painted the very famous fresco named the Madonna del Sacco, a lunette in the cloisters of the Servi; this picture (named after a sack against which Joseph is represented propped) is generally accounted his masterpiece. His final work at Lo Scalzo, 1526, was the Birth of the Baptist, executed with some enhanced elevation of style after Andrea had been diligently studying Michelangelo’s figures in the sacristy of S. Lorenzo. In the following year he completed at S. Salvi, near Florence, a celebrated Last Supper, in which all the personages seem to be portraits. This also is a very fine example of his style, though the conception of the subject is not exalted. It is the last monumental work of importance which Andrea del Sarto lived to execute. He dwelt in Florence throughout the memorable siege, which was soon followed by an infectious pestilence. He caught the malady, struggled against it with little or no tending from his wife, who held aloof, and died, no one knowing much about it at the moment, on 22d January 1531, at the comparatively early age of forty-three. He was buried unceremoniously in the church of the Servi.

Various portraits painted by Andrea are regarded as likenesses of himself, but this is not free from some doubt. One is in the London National Gallery, an admirable half-figure, purchased in 1862. Another is at Alnwick Castle, a young man about twenty years of age, with his elbow on a table. Another at Panslianger may perhaps represent in reality his pupil Domenico Conti. Another youthful portrait is in the Uffizi Gallery, and the Pitti Gallery contains more than one. Among his more renowned works not already specified are the following. The Virgin and Child, with St Francis and St John the Evangelist and two Angels, now in the Uffizi, painted for the church of S. Francesco in Florence; this is termed the Madonna di S. Francesco, or Madonna delle Arpie, from certain figures of harpies which are decoratively introduced, and is rated as Andrea’s masterpiece in oil-painting. The altarpiece in the Uffizi, painted for the monastery of S. Gallo, the Fathers Disputing on the Doctrine of the Trinity—Sts Augustine, Dominic, Francis, Lawrence, Sebastian, and Mary Magdalene— a very energetic work. Both these pictures are comparatively early—towards 1517. The Charity now in the Louvre (perhaps the only painting which Andrea executed while in France). The Pietà, in the Belvedere of Vienna; this work, as well as the Charity, shows a strong Michelangelesque influence. At Poggio a Caiano a celebrated fresco (1521) representing Julius Caesar receiving tribute, various figures bringing animals from foreign lands—a striking perspective arrangement; it was left unfinished by Andrea, and was completed by Alessandro Allori. Two very remarkable paintings (1523) containing various incidents of the life of the patriarch Joseph, executed for the Borgherini family. In the Pitti Gallery two separate compositions of the Assumption of the Virgin, also a fine Pietà In the Madrid Museum the Virgin and Child, with Joseph, Elizabeth, the infant Baptist, and an Archangel. In the Louvre the Holy Family, the Baptist pointing upwards. In the Berlin Gallery a portrait of his wife. In Panslianger a fine portrait named Laura. The second picture in the National Gallery ascribed to Andrea, a Holy Family, is by some critics regarded as the work rather of one of his scholars— we hardly know why. A very noticeable incident in the life of Andrea del Sarto relates to the copy, which he produced in 1523, of the portrait group of Leo X. by Raphael; it is now in the Naples Museum, the original being in the Pitti Gallery, Ottaviano de’ Medici, the owner of the original, was solicited by Duke Frederick II. of Mantua to present it to him. Unwilling to part with so great a pictorial prize, and unwilling also to disoblige the duke, ottaviano got Andrea to make the copy, which was consigned to the duke as being the original. So deceptive was tho imitation that even Giulio Romano, who had himself manipulated the original to some extent, was completely taken in; and, on showing the supposed Raphael years afterwards to Vasari, who knew the facts, he could only be undeceived when a private mark on the canvas was named to him by Vasari, and brought under his eye. It was Michelangelo who had introduced Vasari in 1524 to Andrea’s studio. He is said to have thought very highly of Andrea’s powers, saying on one occasion to Raphael, “There is a little fellow in Florence who will bring sweat to your brow if ever he is engaged in great works.”

Andrea had true pictorial style, a very high standard of correctness, and an enviable balance of executive endowments. The point of technique in which he excelled least was perhaps that of discriminating the varying textures of different objects and surfaces. There is not much elevation or ideality in his works—much moro of reality. His chiaroscuro is not carried out according to strict rule, but is adjusted to his liking for harmony of colour and fused tone and transparence; in fresco more especially his predilection for varied tints appears excessive. It may be broadly said that his taste in colouring was derived mainly from Fra Bartolommeo, and in form from Michelangelo; and his style partakes of the Venetian and Lombard, as well as the Florentine and Roman—some of his figures are even adapted from Albert Dürer. In one way or other he continued improving to the last. In drawing from nature, his habit was to sketch very slightly, making only such a memorandum as sufficed to work from. The scholars of Andrea were very numerous; but, according to Vasari, they were not wont to stay long, being domineered over by his wife; Pontormo and Domenico Puligo may be mentioned.

In our account of Andrea del Sarto we have followed the main lines of the narrative of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, supplemented by Vasari, Lanzi, and others. There are biographies by Biadi (1829) and by Von Reumont.