Fra Bartolomeo

Fra Bartolomeo (Mar 28, 1472 - Oct 6, 1517) or Bartolommeo OP (March 28, 1472 – October 31, 1517), also known as Bartolommeo di Pagholo, Bartolommeo di S. Marco, and his original name Baccio della Porta, was an Italian Renaissance painter of religious subjects. He spent all his career in Florence until his mid-forties, when he travelled to work in various cities, as far south as Rome. He trained with Cosimo Roselli and in the 1490s fell under the influence of Savonarola, which led him to become a Dominican friar in 1500, renouncing painting for several years.

He was instructed to resume painting for the benefit of his order in 1504, and now developed an idealized High Renaissance style, seen in his Vision of St Bernard of that year, now in poor condition but whose "figures and drapery move with a seraphic grace that must have struck the young Raphael with the force of revelation".[3] He remained friends with Raphael, and they both influenced the other.
His portrait of Savonarola remains the most famous image of the reformer. Fra Bartolomeo painted both in oils and fresco, and some of his drawings are pure landscape sketches that are the earliest of this type from Italy.

Initially, his works showed the influence of Rosselli's assistant, Piero di Cosimo, and those of Domenico Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi. After his hiatus from 1500 to 1503, he seemed to change vision, taking from Raphael the representation of light and its effects over moving shapes.

Fra Bartolomeo's figures are generally small and draped. These qualities were alleged against him as defects, and to prove that his style was not the result of want of power, he painted the magnificent figure of the St. Mark Evangelist (ranked as his masterpiece), and the undraped figure of Saint Sebastian. It is alleged that the latter was felt to be so strongly expressive of suffering and agony, that it was found necessary to remove it from the place where it had been exhibited in the chapel of a convent.

Fra Bartolomeo's compositions are remarkable for skill in the massing of light and shade, richness and delicacy of colouring, and for the admirable drapery of the figures, Bartolomeo having been the first to introduce and use the lay-figure with joints.

Among his pupils were Cecchino del Frate, Benedetto Ciamfanini, Gabriel Rustici, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (the son of Domenico Ghirlandaio), and Fra Paolo Pistolese.

Pieces
Assumption of Mary (1508) - Oil on canvas, Kaiser – Friedrich – Museum, Berlin (destroyed in 1945)
Madonna in Glory with Saints (1512, with Albertinelli) - Oil on canvas, Cathedral of Besançon
Holy Conversation (1512) - Oil on canvas,
Christ Supported by Two Angels (c. 1514) - Oil on canvas, Casa Vasari, Arezzo
St. Sebastian (1515) - Oil on canvas, Alaffre Collection, Bezenas, France
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