Fra Bartolommeo | Page 7

grotesque. He no doubt drew designs for friezes and
fountains, for architraves and door mouldings, in which distorted faces
look out from all kinds of writhing scrolls; and lizards, dragons, snakes,
and creeping plants, mingle according to the artist's fancy. Andrea was
however often employed in more serious work, as the records of the
Servite Convent prove, for they contain the note of payment to him, in
1510, for the curtains of the altarpiece which Filippino Lippi had
painted. These curtains were till lately attributed to Andrea del Sarto, or
Francia Bigio.
This is the Andrea Feltrini mentioned by Crowe and Cavalcaselle as
working in the cloister of the Servi with Andrea del Sarto and Francia
Bigio between 1509 and 1514.[Footnote: _History of Painting_, vol. iii.
chap. xvii. p. 546.]
But Baccio's dearest friend in the studio was a boy nearly his own age,
Mariotto Albertinelli, son of Biagio di Bindo, born October 13, 1474.
He had experienced the common lot of young artists in those days, and
had been apprenticed to a gold-beater, but preferred the profession of
painter. From the first these two lads, being thrown almost entirely
together in the work of the studio, formed one of those pure, lasting
friendships, of which so many exist in the annals of art, and so few in
the material world. They helped each other in the drudgery, and
enjoyed their higher studies together; but they did not draw all their
inspirations from the over-coloured works of Cosimo--although
Mariotto once reproduced his red-winged cherubim in after life
[Footnote: In the 'Trinity' in the Belle Arti, Florence.]--nor from the
hard and laboured myths of Piero.
They went to higher founts, for scarcely a trace of these early
influences are to be found in their paintings. Vasari says they studied
the Cose di Leonardo. The great artist had at this time left the studio of
Verocchio, and was fast rising into fame in Florence, so it is most
probable that two youths with strong artistic tendencies would study,
not only the sketches, but also the precepts, of the great man. Besides
this there were two national art-schools open to students in Florence:

these were the frescoes of Masaccio and Lippi in the Carmine, and the
Medicean garden in the Via Cavour, then called Via Larga.

CHAPTER III
.
THE GARDEN AND THE CLOISTER. A.D. 1487-1495.
The two boys left the studio of Cosimo Roselli at an early age. There
had been trouble in the house of Paolo the ex-muleteer, and Baccio's
already serious mind had been awed by the sight of death. His little
brother, Domenico, died in 1486 at seven years of age. His father,
Paolo, died in 1487; thus Baccio, at the age of twelve or thirteen, was
left the head of the family, and the supporter of his stepmother and her
babes. This may account for his leaving Cosimo so young, and setting
up his studio with Mariotto as his companion, in his own house at the
gate of S. Pier Gattolini; this partnership began presumably about the
year 1490.
Conscious that they were not perfected by Cosimo's teaching, they both
set themselves to undergo a strict discipline in art, and, friends as they
were, their paths began to diverge from this point. Their natural tastes
led them to opposite schools--Baccio to the sacred shrine of art in the
shadowed church, Mariotto to the greenery and sunshine of the Medici
garden, where beauty of nature and classic treasures were heaped in
profusion; whose loggie [Footnote: Arched colonnades.] glowed with
the finest forms of Greek sculpture, resuscitated from the tombs of ages
to inspire newer artists to perfection, but alas! also to debase the aim of
purely Christian art.
Baccio's calm devotional mind no doubt disliked the turmoil of this
garden, crowded with spirited youths; the tone of pagan art was not in
accordance with his ideal, and so he learned from Masaccio and Lippi
that love of true form and harmonious composition, which he perfected
afterwards by a close study of Leonardo da Vinci, whose principles of
chiaroscuro he seems to have completely carried out. With this training
he rose to such great celebrity even in his early manhood, that Rosini
[Footnote: Rosini, _Storia della Pittura_, chap. xvii. p. 48.] calls him
"the star of the Florentine school in Leonardo and Michelangelo's
absence," and he attained a grandeur almost equal to the latter, in the S.

Mark and SS. Peter and Paul of his later years.
Meanwhile Mariotto was revelling in the Eden of art, drawing daily
beneath the Loggie--where the orange-trees grew close to the pillars--
from the exquisite statues and "torsi," peopling the shades with white
forms, or copying cartoons by the older masters, which hung against
the walls.
The custode of all these treasures was Bertoldo, an