Fra Bartolomeo

The life of Fra Bartolomeo,
scene by scene

1. 1485Florence

   A boy of about eleven or twelve walks into the workshop of the Florentine painter Cosimo Rosselli. His name is Baccio. His family lived near the city gate of San Pier Gattolini, so people called him Baccio della Porta, Baccio of the Gate.

   In that workshop he met another apprentice, Mariotto Albertinelli. The two became close friends, and later they ran a workshop together for years.

2. 1498Florence

   In April 1498 an angry crowd pounds on the doors of the convent of San Marco. They have come to seize the friar Girolamo Savonarola. The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote that Baccio, trapped inside, vowed to become a friar himself if he got out alive.

   Baccio was a follower of Savonarola. According to Vasari, he carried his own drawings of nudes to Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities and threw them into the flames. That May, Savonarola was executed in the main square of Florence.

3. 1500Prato

   On July 26, 1500, Baccio enters the Dominican convent of San Domenico in Prato as a novice. A year later he took his vows and the name Fra Bartolomeo, Brother Bartholomew.

   His unfinished work passed to his friend. Albertinelli completed the Last Judgment fresco that Baccio had begun. For several years after that, the new friar barely painted. The museum dates this pen drawing, Approach to a Mountain Village with Horsemen on the Road, to about 1501, in that quiet time. Two riders and a striding man pass a cluster of steep-roofed houses, caught in a few lines of brown ink.

   Painted around this timeApproach to a Mountain Village with Horsemen on the Road
4. 1504Florence

   In 1504 Fra Bartolomeo takes charge of the painting workshop at San Marco and picks up his brush again. The young Raphael was living in Florence in those years. Vasari wrote that Raphael sought out the friar, the two became friends, and each learned from the other: Raphael about color, Bartolomeo about perspective.

   The Nativity belongs to this return. Joseph in a red cloak and Mary in a deep blue mantle kneel on either side of the baby on the ground. Above them, three angels in pink, yellow and blue join hands as they fly.

   Painted around this timeThe Nativity
5. 1508Venice

   In 1508 Fra Bartolomeo travels to Venice. The Dominican friars of San Pietro Martire on the island of Murano had ordered an altarpiece from him. But they never paid the agreed price.

   So he did not hand it over. The altarpiece, which shows God the Father appearing above Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Siena, ended up in Lucca, where it still hangs.

6. 1513Rome

   Around 1513 Fra Bartolomeo goes to Rome. Michelangelo had just finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Raphael was painting rooms in the papal palace. There the friar began large figures of the apostles Peter and Paul.

   According to Vasari, he went back to Florence before finishing, and Raphael completed the Saint Peter. The two friends who had once traded lessons in Florence ended up sharing a single painting.

7. 1517Florence

   In the autumn of 1517, Fra Bartolomeo falls ill with a violent fever in Florence. Vasari blamed a meal of too many figs. He died that October and was buried at San Marco.

   His landscape drawings were later bound into an album by a collector, and the album was eventually broken up. One of its pages is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and his quiet Nativity is at the Art Institute of Chicago.