Fra Bartolommeo Part 2

Then came that strange carnival when there were no maskers in the city, but white-robed boys went from house to house to collect the vanities for the burning--when the flames of the fires, hitherto saturnalian, were the flames of a holocaust, wherein each one cast the sins and temptations, even the pretty things which, though dear to himself, withdrew him from G.o.d. And when the white-robed boys came to the studio of the friends at the gate of S. Pier Gattolini, with what sighs and self-immolation Baccio looked for the last time at some of his studies which he judged to come under the head of _anathemata_, and handed them over to the acolytes. How Mariotto's soul, warm to Pagan art, burned within him at this sacrifice! And how he would talk more than ever against the monks, and hang up his own cartoons and studies of the Greek Venus in the studio for Baccio's behoof!

In these years we have no notice of authentic works done by the youthful partners, though biographers talk of their having commissions for madonnas, and other works of art.

In 1497 Francesco Valori, the grand-featured, earnest admirer of Savonarola, became Gonfaloniere in the time of Piero de' Medici's exile, [Footnote: Gino Capponi, _Storia delta Republica di Firenze_, lib. vi.

chap. xi. p. 233.] and the friar's party was in the ascendent. Rosini [Footnote: _Storia delta Pittura_, chap. xvii. p. 48.] says that belonging to a faction was a means of fame, and that the Savonarola party was powerful, giving this as a reason for Baccio's partisans.h.i.+p; but this we can hardly believe, his whole life proved his earnestness.

He was much beloved in Florence for his calm upright nature and good qualities. He delighted in the society of pious and learned men, spent much time in the convent, where he had many friends among the monks; yet with all he kept still faithful to his early friend Mariotto, whose life was cast so differently. Savonarola's faction was powerful, but the Medici had still adherents who stirred up a strong party against him.

His spirit of reform at length aroused the ire of the Pope, who forbade him to preach. He disobeyed, and the sermons on Ezekiel were scenes of tumult; no longer a group of rapt faces dwelling on his words, but frowns, murmurs, and anathemas from a crowd only kept off him by a circle of armed adherents round his pulpit.

At length, on June 22nd, the excommunication by Pope Alessandro VI.

(Borgia) fell like a thunderclap, and the Medicean youths marched in triumphant procession with torches and secular music to burlesque the Laudi; no doubt Albertinelli was one of these, while Baccio grieved among the awestruck friars in the convent.

In 1498 Savonarola again lifted up his voice; the church was not large enough, so he preached beneath the blue sky on the Piazza San Marco; and Fra Domenico Buonvicini da Pescia, in the eagerness of partisans.h.i.+p, said that his master's words would stand the ordeal of fire. Then came that tumultuous day of April 7th, the "Sunday of the Olives," when the Franciscans and Dominicans argued while the fire burnt out before them, when Savonarola's great spirit quailed within him, and the ordeal failed; a merciful rain quenching the flames which none dared to brave save the undaunted Fra Domenico himself.

There was no painting done in the studio on that day we may be sure.

Baccio was one of the surging, conflicting crowd gathered beneath the mingling shadows of Orcagna's arches and Arnolfo's great palace, and at eventide he was one of the armed partisans who protected the friar back to his convent, menaced not only by rains from heaven, but by the stormy wrath of an angry populace, defrauded of the sight they came to see.

The next day was the one which determined the painter's future life.

There was in the city a curious process of crystallisation of all the particles held in solution round the fire the previous day. The Palazzo Vecchio attracted about its doors the "Arrabiati." The "Compagnacci"

a.s.sembled, armed, by the Duomo. The streets were full of detached parties of Piagnoni, treading ways of peril to their centre, San Marco.

Pa.s.sions raged and seethed all day, till at the hour of vespers a cry arose, "_a San Marco_," and thither the mult.i.tude--500 Compagnacci, and 300 Palleschi--rushed, armed with picks and arquebusses, &c. They killed some stray Piagnoni whom they found praying by a shrine, and placed guards at the streets which led to the convent; then the a.s.sault began.

The church was dimly lighted. Savonarola and Fra Domenico kneeled on the steps of the altar, with many wors.h.i.+ppers around them, singing tremulous hymns; amongst these were Francesco Valori, Ridolfi, and Baccio della Porta, but all armed, as Cronaca tells us. They still sang hymns when the doors were attacked with stones; then leaving the priests and women to pray for them the men rushed to the defence.

Old Valori, with a few brave friends, guarded the door; others made loop-holes of the windows and fired out; some went up the campanile, and some on the roof. Baccio fought bravely among the rest. The Palleschi were almost repulsed, but at length succeeded in setting fire to the doors. The church was filled with smoke; a turbulent crowd rushed wildly in. Savonarola saw his people fall dead beside him on the altar steps, and, taking up the Sacrament, he fled to the Greek library, where the messengers of the Signoria came and arrested both himself and Fra Domenico. It was in the fierce fight that ensued when the enemies poured in, laying hands sacrilegiously on every thing sacred, that Baccio made the vow that if he were saved this peril, he would take the habit--a vow which certainly was not made in a cowardly spirit, he fighting to the death, and then espousing the losing cause. [Footnote: Gino Capponi, lib. vi. chaps. i. and ii., and Padre Marchese, _San Marco_, p. 147 _et seq._]

Then came that sad 23rd of May, the eve of the Ascension, when three martyrs went calmly to their death beneath the shadow of the old palace, amidst the insults of an infuriated crowd, and Arno's yellow waters received their ashes. [Footnote: Capponi, chap. ii. p. 253.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAVONAROLO AS PETER MARTYR. BY FRA BARTOLOMMEO. _In the Accademia delle Belle Arti, Florence_.]

After the death of Savonarola the party had many defaulters; but Baccio, the Delia Robbias, Credi, Cronaca, and many other artists, were faithful, and even showed their grief by abandoning for a time the arts they loved. "It almost seemed as if with him they had lost the sacred flame from which their fervid imagination drew life and aliment."

[Footnote: Marchese, _San Marco_, lib. iii. p. 261.]

While all these events had been taking place, Baccio had worked as often as his perturbed spirit would allow, at a great fresco of the _Last Judgment_, in a chapel of the cemetery of S. Maria Nuova. A certain Gerozzi, di Monna Venna Dini, gave him the commission, and as far as he had gone, the painter had given entire satisfaction. This fresco, his first as far as is known, shows Baccio's style as fully as his later ones. We have here his great harmony of form, and intense suggestiveness in composition. The infinity of heaven is emblematised in circles of saints and cherubim around the enthroned Christ. The cross, a link between heaven and earth, is borne by a trinity of angels; S. Michael, as the avenging spirit, stands a powerful figure in the foreground dividing the saved from the lost; the whole composition forming a heavenward cross on an earthly foundation. There are no caves and holes of torture with muscular bodies writhing within them; but in the despairing figures pa.s.sing away on the right, some with heads bowed on clasped hands, others lifting up faces and arms in a vain cry for mercy, what suggestions there are of infinite remorse!--more dignified far than the distorted sufferers in the torture pits of previous masters. These are just indicated by two demons, and a subterranean fire behind the unblest souls. Miss Owen, [Footnote: _Art Schools of Christendom_, edited by Prof. Ruskin.] speaking Mr. Ruskin's sentiments, calls this a great falling off from Giotto and Orcagna's conceptions; but though theirs may be more powerful and terrible, a greater suggestion of Christian religion is here.

They, and later, Michelangelo, flung Dante's great struggling soul in tangible forms upon the walls, and embodied his poem, awful, grand, and earnest, with all the human pa.s.sion intensified into human suffering.

Fra Bartolommeo shows the Christian spirit; his faces look beyond the present judgment, and, instead of wrath, mercy is the predominating idea. It is like the difference in spirit between the Old Testament and the New.

The painter's reverence of Fra Angelico, and estimation of the divinity of art, is shown by Fra Angelico being placed among the saints of heaven on the right of the Saviour.

Leonardo's instructions for shading off a light sky will occur to any one who studies the finely gradated tints mingling with the clouds around the celestial group. But grand as the fresco is, and interesting as it must have been to the artist at this time, when thoughts of Savonarola mingled with every stroke, he felt he was not fulfilling his true mission in the world. Drawn more and more to the convent, hallowed to him by the memory of the martyr-friar, he was also more attuned to thoughts of retirement by family bereavements--one young brother, Piero, only being left to him out of the whole circle. The reluctance to leave this youth alone may have deferred for a time his taking the monastic vows; but having placed him under the guardians.h.i.+p of Santi Pagnini, a Dominican, he consigned the _Last Judgment_ to Mariotto to finish, and leaving his worldly goods to his brother, took the habit in the convent of S. Domenico, at Prato, on July 26th, 1500, two years after first making the resolution. His year of probation over, he took the final vows and became Fra Bartolommeo.

A doc.u.ment in S. Marco proves that he was possessed of worldly goods when he entered, [Footnote: Rosini, _Storia della Pittura_, chap xxvii.]

among which were the house of his father in S. Pier Gattolini, and the podere at Brozzi. Having once given himself up to monasticism, Fra Bartolommeo would offer no half-service, his brushes were left behind with all other worldly things, and here closes Baccio della Porta's first artistic career.

His sun was set only to rise again to greater brilliance in the future as Fra Bartolommeo, a name famous for ever in the annals of art.

CHAPTER V.

FRA BARTOLOMMEO IN THE CONVENT. A.D. 1504-1509.

Four years had pa.s.sed, and the monk had never touched a pencil, but his mission in art was not fulfilled, and events were working towards that end, for the spirit of art once awakened could not die either in that convent or in that age.

His friend, Mariotto, kept him _au courant_ in all the gossip of art, and told him of the great cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo, which he too went to see. They might have inspired him afresh, or perhaps in advising Albertinelli he himself felt impelled to paint, or possibly the visits of Raphael in 1504 influenced him.

Padre Marchese takes the conventional view, and says that Santi Pagnini, the oriental scholar and lover of art, came back to S. Marco in 1504 as prior, and used not only his entreaties, but his authority, to induce Fra Bartolommeo to recommence painting. However this may be, it is certain that when Bernardo del Bianco, who had built a beautiful chapel in the Badia from Rovezzano's designs, wished for an altar-piece worthy of its beauty, which he felt no hand could execute so well as that of the Frate--he yielded to persuasion, and the _Vision of S. Bernard_ was begun. The contract is dated 18th November, 1504; a part payment of sixty florins in gold was made 16th of June, 1507. [Footnote: Padre Marchese, _Memorie_, iii. vol. ii. p. 594.]

This picture, now in the Belle Arti of Florence, is so much injured by re-painting that some parts seem even crude. The saint is on his knees writing, while the vision of the Virgin and Child stands poised in air before him; she inspires his pen, and the infant Christ gives His blessing on the work. There is great spirituality and ecstasy in St.

Bernard's face, his white robe contrasts well with two saints behind him, which carry out Fra Bartolommeo's favourite triangular grouping, and with a rich harmony of colour balance his white robe.

The Virgin is drawn with great n.o.bility and grace, her drapery admirably majestic, yet airy, and a sweet, infantile playfulness renders the Child charming. The angels beneath the Virgin's feet are lovely, but the group of seraphs behind are the least pleasing of all. They are of the earth, earthy, and seem reminiscences of the Florentine maidens the artist met in the streets. Possibly this is the part most injured by the restorer's hand. The colouring of the two saints behind S. Bernard-one in a green robe with bronze-gold shades, and the other blue and orange-is very suggestive of Andrea del Sarto, and seems to render probable Rosini's a.s.sertion that the Frate "taught the first steps of this difficult career to that artist who alone was called 'senz' errori.'"

Having once retaken the brush, Fra Bartolommeo recovered his former skill and fame; a beautiful specimen of this period is the _Meeting of Christ with the Disciples of Emmaus_ (1506), a fresco in a lunette over the door of the refectory at S. Marco; in which he combines a richness of colouring rarely obtained in fresco, with a drawing which is almost perfect. Fra Niccol della Magna, who was prior in that year, and left in 1507 to become Archbishop of Capua, sat for one of the saints.

Contemporory with this may be dated also the figure of the _Virgin_, painted for Agnolo Doni, now in the Corsini gallery in Rome. Giovanni de' Medici also gave him a commission.

Meanwhile the _S. Bernard_ was not paid for. Fra Bartolommeo priced it at 200 ducats, and the convent being the gainer by his works, took his own valuation. Bernardo offered only eighty ducats; the Frati were indignant, and called in the Abbot of the Badia as umpire; he being unable to move Bernardo, retired from office; then a council of friends was resolved on, in which Mariotto was for the painter, and Lorenzo de Credi for the purchaser; but this also failed.

It was next proposed to submit the question to the Guild of Druggists (_arte degli speziali_), which included at that time also doctors and painters; but the convent, refusing lay judgment, took the offer of Francesco Magalotti, a relative of Bernardo, who priced it at 100 ducats, and the monks had to be satisfied. The dispute ended July 17th, 1507. [Footnote: Rosini, _Storia della Pittura_, chap, xxvii. p. 245, and Padre Marchese, _Memorie_, &c., vol. ii. pp. 42 to 45.]

All writers agree as to the fact of Fra Bartolommeo's friends.h.i.+p with Raphael, but very few are decided as to its date. Raphael was in Florence in 1504, but then Fra Bartolommeo had not re-commenced painting, and would have no works in the convent to excite his admiration of the colouring. Padre Marchese, following Rosini and Padre Luigi Pungeleoni, a.s.serts that this intimacy was during Raphael's second visit in 1506, when he might have seen the newly-finished fresco of _The Disciples at Emmaus_. It is undoubted that their intercourse was beneficial to both. Raphael studied anew Leonardo's principles of colour under Fra Bartolommeo's interpretation of them, and the Frate improved his knowledge of perspective and harmony of composition. It is said they worked together at some pictures, of which one is in France, and another at Milan; but there is not sufficient evidence to prove this.

It is also thought that Fra Bartolommeo helped in the composition of Raphael's famous _Madonna del Baldacchino_, which is truly very much in his style.

The year 1508 marks the Frate's first acquaintance with the Venetian school, which was not without its influence upon him. Frequent interchange of visits took place between the Dominicans in the different parts of Italy; and Fra Bartolommeo took the opportunity then offered him of going to visit his brethren at Venice.

His namesake, Baccio di Monte Lupo, a sculptor who had fled from Florence after the death of Savonarola, and who had fought side by side with Baccio in the siege of S. Mark's church, was in Venice at that time, working on the tomb of Benedetto da Pesaro in the church of the Frati, and he was only too delighted to show the beauties of the Queen of the Adriatic to an artistic mind. Tintoretto was not yet born; t.i.tian was only just rising into fame, though his style had not yet become what it was after Giorgione's influence; but Fra Bartolommeo must have found much that was sympathetic in the exquisite works of Giovanni Bellini and his school, and much to admire in the glorious colouring of Giorgione.

Father Dalzano, the vicar of the monastery of S. Peter Martyr at Murano, gave the Florentine monk a commission for a picture of the value of seventy or 100 ducats. Not having time to paint this during his stay, he promised to execute it on his return to Florence, and the vicar paid him in advance twenty-eight ducats in money and colours; the rest was to be raised by the sale of some MS. letters from S. Catherine of Siena, which a friend of Father Dalzano near Florence held in possession.

Fra Bartolommeo, having brought home from the Venetian school a new impulse for painting, and wis.h.i.+ng to diffuse the religious influence of art more widely, desired to enlarge his atelier and school at San Marco.

His only a.s.sistants in the convent were Fra Paolino of Pistoja, and one or two miniaturists, who were only good at missals. Fra Paolino (born 1490) took the vows at a very early age, and was removed to Florence from Prato with Fra Bartolommeo. He was the son of a painter, Bernardino di Antonio, but though he learned the first principles from him, his real art was imbibed from the Frate, under whom, together with Mariotto, he worked for years.

But this youthful scholar was not enough for Fra Bartolommeo's new energies. He pined for his old friend, Mariotto, who could follow out his designs in his own style so closely, that an unpractised eye could not see the difference of hand; and such was his influence on the rulers of the order, that they allowed a most unique partners.h.i.+p to be entered into.

The parties were, Albertinelli on one side, and the convent and Fra Bartolommeo on the other. The partners to provide the expenses, and the profits to be divided between the convent and Mariotto; the vow of poverty not allowing Fra Bartolommeo as an individual any personal share. This began in 1509 and lasted till 1512. The inventory of the profits and the division made when the partners.h.i.+p was dissolved, given entire by Padre Marchese, [Footnote: Padre Marchese, _Memorie_, &c., vol. ii.] are very interesting. The two artists had separate monograms to distinguish the pictures which were specially their own, besides which the monk signed his with the touching pet.i.tion, "_orate pro pictore,_" his friend merely Latinising his name; the works painted together were signed by the combined monograms. Before setting a hand to anything else, the Frate fulfilled his engagement to the Venetian prior, for whom he painted the _Eternal in Heaven_, surrounded by saints and angels; but of this we will speak later.

CHAPTER VI.

ALBERTINELLI IN THE WORLD. A.D. 1501-1510.