Fra Bartolommeo | Page 9

this second adherence to Fra Bartolommeo.
What his manner afterwards became we have a proof in the Salutation
(1503), in which there is grand simplicity of motive combined with the
most extreme richness of execution and fullest harmony of colour.
This second union between the friends could not have been so
satisfactory to either as the first pure boyish love, when they had been
full of youthful hopes, and felt their hearts expand with the dreams and
visions of genius. Now instead of the mere differences between two
styles of art, there 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 prophetæ
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
.
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,