Fra Bartolommeo | Page 9

were differences which much more seriously affected their characters; they were daily sundering, one going slowly towards the cloister, the other to the world. Albertinelli had gained a greater love of worldly success and luxury.
Baccio's mind, always attuned to devotion, was now intensified by family sorrows, which no doubt brought him nearer to heaven. Thus softened, he had the more readily received the seeds of faith which Savonarola scattered broadcast.
Yet though every word of the one was a wound to the other, this strangely assorted pair of friends did not part. Rosini well defined their union as "a knot which binds more strongly by pulling contrary ways." [Footnote: _Storia della Pittura,_ chap. xvii. p. 48]
So when Albertinelli, while colouring with zeal a design of Baccio's, would inveigh against all monks, the Dominicans in particular, and Savonarola especially, his friend would argue that the inspired prophet was not an enemy, but a purifier and reformer of art. Probably Baccio was at the Duomo on that Sunday in Lent, 1495, and reported to Mariotto those wondrous words of Savonarola, that "Beauty ought never to be taken apart from the true and good," and how, after quoting the same sentiments from Socrates and Plato, the preacher went on to say, "True beauty is neither in form nor colour, but in light. God is light, and His creatures are the more lovely as they approach the nearer to Him in beauty. And the body is the more beautiful according to the purity of the soul within it." Certain it is that this divine light lived ever after in the paintings of Fra Bartolommeo.
He frequented the cloisters of San Marco, where even Lorenzo de' Medici used to go and hear the prior expound Christianity near the rose tree. There were Lorenzo di Credi and Sandro Botticelli, both middle-aged men, of a high standing as artists; there were the Delia Robbias, father and son, and several others. Sandro, while listening, must have taken in the inspired words with the scent and beauty of the roses, whose spirit he gives in so many of his paintings.
Young Baccio, on the contrary, feasted his eyes on the speaker's face, till the very soul within it was imprinted on his mind, from whence he reproduced it in that marvellous likeness, the year after the martyrdom of Savonarola.
This is the earliest known work of Fra Bartolommeo, and is a faithful portrait; the deep-sunk eye-socket, and eye like an internal fire, showing the preacher's powerful mind; the prominent aquiline nose and dilating vehement nostril bespeaking his earnestness and decision; the large full mouth alone shows the timorousness which none but himself knew of, so overpowered was it by his excitable spirit. The handling is Baccio's own able style, but Sig. Cavalcaselle thinks the influences of Cosimo Roselli are apparent in the low tone and clouded translucent colour; he signed it "Hieronymi Ferrariensis, a Deo missi prophet? effigies," a legend which expresses the more than reverence which Baccio cherished for the preacher. This portrait has only lately been identified by its present possessor, Sig. Ermolao Rubieri, who discovered the legend under a coat of paint. Its vicissitudes are traceable from the time when Sig. Averardo (or, as Vasari calls him, Alamanno) Salviati brought it back from Ferrara, where no doubt it had been in the possession of Savonarola's family. Salviati gave it to the convent of San Vincenzo at Prato, from which place Sig. Rubieri purchased it in 1810. The likeness of the reformer in the Belle Arti of Florence has been supposed to be this one, but it is more likely to be the one done by Fra Bartolommeo at Pian di Mugnone in after years, when he drew the friar as S. Peter Martyr, with the wound on his head.

CHAPTER IV
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SAN MARCO. A.D. 1496-1500.
Padre Marchese, himself a Dominican, speaks thus of his convent:--"San Marco has within its walls the Renaissance, a compendium in two artists. Fra Angelico, the painter of the ideal, Fra Bartolommeo, of form. The first closes the antique Tuscan school. He who has seen Fra Angelico, has seen also Giotto, Cimabue, &c. The second represents the modern school. In him are almost comprised Masaccio, Lorenzo di Credi, Leonardo, Buonarroti, and Andrea del Sarto."
The first, Fra Angelico, "sets himself to contemplate in God the fount and architype of the beautiful, and, as much as is possible to mortal hands, reproduces and stamps it in those works which a sensual mind cannot understand, but which to the heavenly soul speak an eloquent language. Fra Bartolommeo, with more analysis, works thoughtfully ... he ascends from the effect to the cause, and in created things contemplates a reflection of spiritual beauty."
It is true the Dominican order has been as great a patron of arts as the Franciscan of literature. It united with