Bartolomeo Francesco Piranesi

“ The evidence of style goes to show that the works of Albertinelli and Fra Bartolommeo influenced him more than those of Piero. Yet though his sphere was devotional, it was "impelled more by a material sense of beauty than by the deep religious feeling which inspired the Frate."
As time went on the youth in strange old Piero's studio became more famous than his master, and felt that he could do greater things away from the stiff method which cramped him, and the whimsicalities which annoyed him. ”

“ In those very plates where he depicts the actually existing monuments of classic Rome, and in which it was his expressed intention to save these august ruins from further injury and preserve them forever in his engravings, he created what he saw anew, and voiced his own distinctive sentiment of the melancholy grandeur of ruined Rome. To-day the word impressionism has come to have a rather restricted meaning in connection with a recent school of art, but Piranesi’s [Pg 131] work, like that of all really great artists, is in the true sense of the word impressionistic. ”

“ With the spirit which animates all periods of great art, they considered no object too insignificant to be made lovely by their talent. They decorated theaters and houses, designing furniture, clocks, vases, and every article of daily life; filling them all with the consummate, delicate art that remains the despair of all who have followed. If, therefore, as is to be supposed, they underwent Piranesi’s influence while in Rome, it would have made itself felt, through them, in all the decorative arts of France. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The romance he shows us is the romance of any enduring monument. It is the monumental quality of Roman construction which makes it akin to the great works of Nature, and the trees and vegetation in Piranesi drawings only help to demonstrate this kinship. The gesticulating figures serve aviii similar purpose. They are the men of a lesser generation gibbering over the work of ancestors they only half comprehend. ”

“ Both Fra Bartolommeo and Albertinelli are little known in this country. Practically nothing has been written about them and very few of their works are in either public galleries or private collections. It is in Italy, of course, that one must study their originals, although the great collections usually include one or two. Most interesting from the viewpoint of the study of art is the evolution of the work of the artist-monk as he came under the influence of the more dramatic modern and frankly sensational work of Raphael, of the Venetians and of Michelangelo. ”

“ At a later period, being invited to Rome, Don Bartolommeo painted a story in the chapel of Pope Sixtus, in company with Luca da Cortona and Pietro Perugino; and having returned to Arezzo, he painted a St. Jerome in Penitence, for the chapel of the Gozzari in the episcopal church. The saint is represented with wasted form, shaven head, and eyes riveted to the cross; he is striking his breast, and the force of the passions, still raging in that excessively attenuated form, is rendered clearly manifest. An immense crag is represented in this work with other rocks ”

“ 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. ”

“ During the eighteenth century, when Piranesi lived, the whole of Italy had sunk to depths of degradation such as few great races have ever known, not because the people were hopelessly decayed, for their great spirit never died, but lived to flame forth in 1848 and create that marvelous present-day regeneration of Italy, which is perhaps the most astonishing example of the rebirth of a once great but apparently dead nation that the world has yet seen. ”

“ In the “Antiquities of Rome,” by Piranesi, there is a series of engravings which the artist calls “his dreams,” and which are supposed to reproduce his own visions during a fit of delirious fever. These engravings represent vast Gothic halls; on the flagstones are strewn all sorts of engines and machines, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, the expression of enormous power and formidable resistance. Along the walls you perceive a staircase, and upon this staircase, climbing, not without trouble, Piranesi himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the supposed Temple of Spes, the ruins of an apse in the gardens of S. Croce, of “Venus and Cupid,” (as it is marked in most maps, and as “Speranza Vecchia” in others,) was fixed upon by Piranesi, who carefully examined all that he could with a view of mapping out his aqueducts, according to the knowledge possessed in his time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Although Piranesi was careful to see that he was always styled “Venetian Architect,” we have no very reliable evidence that he ever composed a building except on paper, and such paper plans as he published do notvii suggest great practical qualities. It is in his drawings of the ruins of ancient Rome that he gives us something at once more rare and more valuable than any ordinary architectural achievement. In them he shows us the inherent romance buried deep in Roman construction. ”

“ Fra Bartolommeo linking up with the religious art of the preceding period, with that of Masaccio, of Piero de Cosimo, his senior student in the studio of Cosimo Roselli, and at last with that of the definitely "modern" painters of the Renaissance, Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo himself, is a transition painter in this supreme period. Technique and the work of hand and brain are rapidly taking the place of inspiration and the desire to convey a message. The aesthetic sensation is becoming an end in itself. ”

“ The landscape is Raphaelesque, and might mark the time when that master and Fra Bartolommeo influenced his style. His best manner approached so nearly to that of the Frate, that had he continued he would have very nearly rivalled his excellence.
His two masterpieces are now in the Uffizi; they were painted for the Brotherhood of S. Zenobio, 1510, to stand one on each side of Albertinelli's Annunciation. One is S. Zenobio (the first bishop and patron saint of Florence) restoring a dead child to life ”

“ In 1741, when twenty-one years of age, Piranesi published his first etchings, four compositions of ruins, afterwards included in his Opere Varie, issued by Bouchard at Rome in 1750. In 1748 he published his Antichità Romane de’ Tempi della Repubblica e de’ primi Imperatori, etc., containing thirty plates of triumphal arches, amphitheatres, and other ancient structures, mostly from places other than Rome. ”

“ The preparing of the panels fell to the work of one of the monk scholars, Fra Andrea. [Footnote: The books of the convent have a note of payment to Fra Bartolommeo for 20th March, 1512, "per parte di lavoro di Fra Andrea converse per mettere d'oro, et ingessare alle tavole nella bottega in diversi lavori" (Padre Marchese, Memorie, lib. ii. chap. in. p. 70) .] Then the master made his sketch in white, or "sgraffito" (i.e. graven on the plaster) , as in the architectural lines of the pictures of patron saints in the Uffizi, and the Marriage of S. Catherine in the Pitti Palace ”

“ To what extent it influenced the style of Raphael, will be afterwards discussed. As a colourist, Fra Bartolommeo was equal to the best of his contemporaries, and superior to any of his rivals in the school of Florence. Few painters of any age have combined harmony of tone so perfectly with brilliance and richness. It is a real joy to contemplate the pure and splendid folds of the white drapery he loved to place in the foreground of his altar-pieces. Solidity and sincerity distinguish his work in every detail, while his feeling is remarkable for elevation and sobriety. ”

“ Fra Bartolomeo, "the last master of this period, first gave gradation to colour, form and masses to drapery, and a grave dignity, till then unknown, to execution." His was the merit of having weaned Raffaelle "from the meanness of Pietro Perugino, and prepared for the mighty style of Michael Angelo Buonarotti." Mr Fuseli is inspired by his admiration of that wonderful man, as painter, sculptor, and architect. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mark, one of the most famous is that of Fra Bartolomeo, in the Palazzo Pitti. He is represented as a man in the prime of life, with bushy hair and a short reddish beard, throned in a niche, and holding in one hand the gospel, in the other a pen; the lion is omitted. The Frate painted this picture for his own convent of San Marco at Florence. It is much lauded and celebrated, but the attitude appeared to me rather forced, and the features rather commonplace. ”