Artwork · 16th century · Fra Bartolomeo

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Approach to a Mountain Village with Horsemen on the Road

Fra Bartolomeoca. 1501Pen and brown ink, traces of black chalk; mounted on an album page29.8 × 20.6 cm

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At a glance

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A road leads up to a small country village with steep-roofed houses, and riders and walkers are coming and going along it.
Fra Bartolomeo, a friar and painter in Florence, drew it around 1501 in pen and brown ink.
On a sheet about a foot tall, a handful of quick pen strokes catch people, horses, and shrubs.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Start with the village in the middle. Two tall houses with steep roofs stand side by side, and a small chimney pokes up from one roof. The front house has a single square door. The walls are shaded with close vertical lines.
Zoom in on the road in front of the village. A few tiny people are walking there. They have no faces and no hands. Each person is just two or three curved lines. Still, you can tell who is in front and who is following.
Now come down to the riders in the foreground. Two people ride side by side toward the village. The one on the left wears a wide-brimmed hat. Another man walks beside the horses. The horses' legs are only a few strokes, yet they seem to be moving.
Look at the two figures at the very front. One stretches his arm forward and takes a long stride. Hatching on his body turns into shadows in his clothes, and a few slanting lines become the ground. You can feel someone in a hurry to get somewhere.
Zoom in near the top. Curly, looping lines run on and on. Are they clouds, or the leaves of tall trees? There is no color and no shading, only outline. Small brown spots are scattered across the paper.

When it was painted

In the spring of 1498, an angry crowd stormed the convent of San Marco in Florence. They had come for the friar Girolamo Savonarola. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, a young painter named Baccio della Porta was inside and vowed that if he got out alive, he would become a friar himself. That young man is the artist we now call Fra Bartolomeo.

Baccio had been one of Savonarola's devoted followers. Vasari says that during one of Savonarola's bonfires of the vanities, Baccio threw his own drawings of nudes into the flames. Savonarola was executed the same year he was seized.

In 1500, at 27, Baccio kept his vow and joined the Dominican order. For the next few years he barely painted. A Last Judgment fresco he had begun was finished by his workshop partner, Mariotto Albertinelli. He returned to painting in earnest around 1504, when he took charge of the workshop at San Marco.

The Met dates this drawing to about 1501, right in those quiet years. It has no saints and no angels, only a country road, a village, and travelers. Many scholars think Fra Bartolomeo made landscape drawings like this from life, out in the countryside.

The sheet was once a page in an album of his landscape drawings, put together by an eighteenth-century collector. The album was later taken apart and its pages scattered. This one came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1975 with the Robert Lehman Collection.

Look again at the man in front, arm flung forward in mid-stride. The friar had nearly set down his brush, yet his pen still caught a traveler hurrying down the road.

The painter

Fra Bartolomeo

1473–1517

All paintings by Fra Bartolomeo →

More by the same painter

The Nativity1504–7

Questions to think about

Look for itHow many horses can you find in this drawing?
Why?Why do you think the artist drew the houses and people with so few lines, almost as if in a hurry?
What about you?After a big decision in his life, Fra Bartolomeo set his work aside for a while. Is stepping back from what we do a waste of time, or something we sometimes need?

Same period