Bartolomeo Ammannati

“ Bartolomeo arose, and as he did so he secretly resolved to square his account with Benedetto in such a way as to serve his country. He soon became the most clever of Aslitta's emissaries, and soon pictured himself as one of the most illustrious patriots of his country bedecked with laurels.
But fortune makes rapid strides. Through certain peculiar events Benedetto turned his attention to Bartolomeo and caused a strict watch to be kept upon him, and when on the evening of the 15th of March he saw him vanish from the Casino he realized all. ”

“ The reason for this particular tourney was to wipe out a deed of murder, and to obliterate from the minds of the people of Verona the fact that a fratricide and a villain ruled over them. Cansignorio della Scala had laden his soul with the murders of two of his brothers in order to secure the succession to his illegitimate sons Bartolomeo and Antonio. Bartolomeo was beloved by the people, and in all ranks of society his presence was hailed with joy and affection. ”

“ The Buoni seem to have been Giovanni, the father, his son, Bartolomeo, and a certain Pantaleone Buon, once believed to be another son, but actually of no kinship with him. To Bartolomeo, sometimes known as Bartolomeo della Madonna dell’Orto, is ascribed the Porta della Carta of the Ducal Palace (1439) on the strength of an inscription opera Bartholomei. The reliefs of the Lion and of Doge Foscari are modern reproductions, but the original head of Foscari, preserved in the palace still, bears witness to the genius of this great craftsman. ”

“ For Bartolomeo and Cangrande della Scala Dante has only words of praise; but some other members of their family come in for the full force of the poet’s wrath, and he speaks in scathing terms of Alberto and Alboino, the former the predecessor, the latter the successor of Bartolomeo. Nor is he less bitter against an illegitimate son of Alberto della Scala, whom his father had made abbot of S. Zeno, and who exercised that office from 1291 to 1314. Speaking of this deformed priest he says,
“ ... ”

“ Bartolomeo, in his figure of St. Mark, has convinced us how important and indispensable is the union of mental conception with truth of observation, in order to give a decided and appropriate character to an Evangelist of the Gospel. None of the pictures of this artist possess the excellence of his St. Mark except one, which is in the city of Lucca, the capital of the republic of that name; and, as that picture is but little known to travellers, and almost unknown to many artists who have visited Italy, a description of it may not be unacceptable. ”

“ But such things count, I am told, for even Doctor Johnson thought better of Reynolds' work after they had dined together.
It seems that Fra Bartolomeo was one of the first and best friends Raphael had at Florence. The monk's gentle spirit and his modest views of men and things won the young Umbrian; and between these two there sprang up a friendship so firm and true that death alone could sever it.
The deep religious devotion of Bartolomeo set the key for the first work done by Raphael at Florence. Most of the time the young man and the monk lived and worked in the same studio. ”

“ Dwelling there accordingly, and attending to the study of design and of architecture, Bartolommeo formed a friendship with the Aretine painter and architect, Giorgio Vasari, as well as with the sculptor Bartolommeo Ammannati, from whom he acquired much useful knowledge appertaining to the arts. ”

“ In the Pitti Palace, a charming Pietà of Fra Bartolommeo's occupies a place near the Pietà of Andrea del Sarto, the two pictures forming a most interesting contrast of style. The kneeling Virgin and S. John support the head of the prostrate Saviour, S. Catherine and Mary Magdalen weep at his feet, the latter in an agony of grief crouches prone on the ground hiding her face. The colouring is extremely rich, broad masses of full-tone melting softly into deep shadows. The handling in the flesh-tones of the dead Saviour, as well as the modelling of form, are most masterly. ”

“ We come to a second gentle monk, not unlike Fra Angelico in his nature, but far less happy than Fra Angelico, in having been born in stormy times. Fra Bartolommeo, called also Baccio della Porta, or Bartholomew of the gate, from the situation of his lodgings when a young man, but scarcely known in Italy by any other name than that of Il Frate, or the Friar, was born near Florence, and trained from his boyhood to be a painter. ”

“ The work, if it had been painted in the larger form, would have been a perfect masterpiece of composition, "a very Beethoven symphony in colour," if we may judge from the sketch at Panshanger, where a living crowd groups round the bier of the archbishop, and life, earnestness, harmony, and richness, are all intense.
So ill was Fra Bartolommeo in 1517 that he was ordered to take the baths at San Filippo, thence he went for the last time to Pian di Mugnone, where he painted a Vision of the Saviour to Mary Magdalen, above the door of the chapel. ”

“ Bartolommeo, when he breaks away and sets out to paint by himself, is crude and strong, but full of vital force. In his altarpiece of 1464, in the Academy, he gives his saints reality by taking them off their pedestals and making them stand upon the ground, and though they are still isolated from one another in the partitions of an ancona, their sparkling eyes, individual features, and curly beards give them a look of life. ”

“ In design and attitude it corresponds to the one described by Vasari, the saint being in a niche, surrounded by a double cornice. The left arm is bound; the right, with its cord hanging, is upraised in attitude of the faith, so fully expressed in the beautiful face. Three arrows are fixed in the body, which is nude except a slight veil across the loins; an angel, also nude, holds the palm to him. Connoisseurs do not think this painting equal in merit to the other works of Fra Bartolommeo. ”

“ They had been much interested in the many examples of Fra Bartolommeo's painting that are in San Marco—where he, as well as Fra Angelico, had been a monk;—in the Academy, and in the Uffizi and Pitti galleries; and had learned to recognize the peculiarities of his grouping of figures, and their abstract, devotional faces, his treatment of draperies, and the dear little angels, with their musical instruments, that are so often sitting at the feet of his madonnas. ”

“ As a building San Marco has been a shrine of art; since the time that Michelozzi, with the assistance of the Medici, built the convent for Sant' Antonino, and Fra Angelico left the impress of his soul on the walls, a long line of artist monks has lived within its cloisters. With San Marco our story has now to deal, for it is impossible to write Fra Bartolommeo's life without touching on the well-known history of Savonarola. ”

“ Rarely does it happen that the man of upright mind and exemplary life is left unprovided by Heaven with valuable friends and an honourable position; rarely does he fail to be held in respect for his excellences while living, or to be venerated and mournfully regretted after his death, by all who have known him. Such was the case with Don Bartolommeo della Gatta, Abbot of San Clemente, in Arezzo, who was in many ways most admirable, and was commendable in all his actions. ”

“ The background is an intricate piece of architecture with vaulted roof, showing that he too had profited by Raphael's instructions in perspective to Fra Bartolommeo.
The Virgin is a tender sweet figure; indeed no artist has given more gracious dignity to womanhood than Albertinelli, although his detractors say his life showed no great respect for it. Above, the Almighty is seen in a yellow light with a circle of angels and seraphs around. It is strange how the realistic painters stopped at nothing, not even the representation of the eternal in a human form. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 nobility 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. ”

“ On Fra Bartolommeo the spirituality of Fra Angelico still lingered, while the perfection of Raphael illumined him. Andrea del Sarto, on the other side, had gathered into his hands the gleams of genius from all the great artists who were his elder contemporaries, and so blending them as to form seemingly a style of his own, distinct from any, has left on our walls and in our galleries hundreds of masterpieces of colour, as gay and varied as the tints the orientals weave into their wondrous fabrics. ”

“ The Christ is a fine nude figure standing in a niche, and in it Fra Bartolommeo has solved the problem of obtaining complete relief almost in monochrome, so little do the lights of the flesh tints, and the warm yellowish tinge of the background differ from each other. All the positive colour is in the drapery of the saints, one in red and green, and another in red and blue. The two angels are exquisitely drawn, and contrast well in their natural innocence with the sentimental pair in Raphael's Madonna of the Baldacchino on the same wall of the Pitti Palace. ”

“ But with the decadence we have happily nothing to do; the artists of whom we speak first, Fra Bartolommeo and Albertinelli, belong to the culmination of art on its rising side, while Andrea del Sarto stands as near to the greatest artists on the other side, and is the last of the group before the decline. ”

“ Fra Bartolommeo painted a figure in oil over the door which leads into the sacristy of the Convent, the subject being San Vincenzio, who was a Monk of his own order, preaching on the rigours of the Divine Justice. In the attitude of this figure, but still more in the head, there is all that sternness and imposing severity, usually manifest in the countenance of the preacher who is labouring to induce men, obstinate in their sins, to amendment of life, by setting before them the terrors of the justice of God ”

“ The nuns of S. Giuliano employed him to paint two pictures, both of which are now in the Belle Arti. One is an altarpiece; the Madonna enthroned, with the Divine Child in her arms. Era Bartolommeo's idea of an angel-sustained canopy is here, but the angels hold it up from the outside instead of the inside. Before her are S. John the Baptist, S. Julian, S. Nicholas, and S. Dominic. The S. Julian has a great similarity to the S. Michael of Perugino, and the S. John, by its good modelling, shows the result of his studies from the antique in the Medici garden. ”

“ Later pieces such as the triptych of 1487 at the Frari reveal a heavy-handed imitation of Mantegna, and any little originality of the master soon gets lost in the voluminous output of the shop. Bartolommeo died in the last year of his century, whose fair average he had well represented. His nephew Alvise Vivarini deserves 364notice as the transmitter of the realism of Antonello da Messina to such artists as Montagna, Cima, and Lorenzo Lotto. As a portraitist he has real power. His great altar-pieces have their bleak and unattractive nobility. ”

“ From 1524 to 1528 the plague desolated Italy, never entirely leaving it. During this time Andrea obtained a commission through Antonio Brancacci, to paint some pictures in the convent of S. Piero at Luco in Mugello, where he retired with his wife and her relations, and his pupil Raffaelo. They spent a very pleasant summer: the nuns made much of his wife and her sisters, and he passed his time in earnest painting. The fruits of his labour are a Pietà, a Visitation, and a Head of Christ—almost a replica of the one in the SS. Annunziata. ”

“ Bartolommeo neglected himself also in other respects, and thinking that to live in the fashion of a would-be philosopher, dirty and ill-regulated, while he shunned the society of his fellows, was the way to render himself a great man, and to secure immortality, he brought himself to an evil end; for nature cannot always support the repeated injuries which men thus constituted will sometimes offer her. ”

“ Then one evening the door clashed open and Bartolommeo strode in, the six tongueless Ethiopians at his heels.
"Ha, fair sirs," he cried. "How like you this unwonted comradeship? Do you not owe old Bartolommeo a blessing for the service he hath done you? Ay, many folk have said that Bartolommeo had no heart and served the devil! Mayhap, mayhap! But certes he played the rôle of guardian angel when he brought you twain together. How now? How now? Hast talked things over? Art in better frame of mind, Messer Hugh? And you, Sir James—art prepared to be communicative? ”