THE DAILY PIC: On Friday afternoon, only two weeks into January, I received what may prove to be the year’s most exciting press release (an oxymoron, I know). It came from the Frick Collection in New York, and announced the first American survey of the art of Andrea del Sarto, one of the very greatest but least remembered of Renaissance painters. (The show premieres at the Getty in Los Angeles in June, then comes to the Frick next October.) Andrea–“del Sarto” isn’t a last name; it just means “the tailor’s son”–painted today’s Daily Pic in Florence in about 1517, and it is now in the National Gallery in London. (Click on my image to zoom in.)  It was one of the works I went back to most often when I was a grad student in England–but I haven’t seen a checklist for the Frick show, so have no idea if the painting will make the trip across the Atlantic. The portrait’s brooding eyes are an Andrea trademark, and they get at something that sets him apart: He may be the first Western artist whose signature style revolves around an emotional tone, carried in his case by the particular and peculiar mood that he gives to almost all his figures. That is, his “style” doesn’t live in how he draws or paints, so much as in the kind of human character that his craft puts on view for us, or even in a human type that it creates.

The Frick was one of the last institutions to be infected by the current epidemic of exhibitionitis, an affliction that has seen swollen exhibition programs taking over museums everywhere, for the sake of attendance and attention rather than because their shows really deserve to exist. (Any exhibition whose title includes the words “masterpieces from” is a sure symptom of the disease; the Frick has had a number of them.) Like a grownup tortured by chicken pox, the Frick may have got a worse than usual case of exhibitionitis because it caught it so late. With “Andrea del Sarto”, it may be showing signs of recovery.

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For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.