THE GARDEN AND THE CLOISTER. A.D. 1487-1495.
The two boys left the studio of Cosimo Roselli at an early age. There
had been trouble in the house of Paolo the ex-muleteer, and Baccio's
already serious mind had been awed by the sight of death. His little
brother, Domenico, died in 1486 at seven years of age. His father,
Paolo, died in 1487; thus Baccio, at the age of twelve or thirteen, was
left the head of the family, and the supporter of his stepmother and her
babes. This may account for his leaving Cosimo so young, and setting up
his studio with Mariotto as his companion, in his own house at the gate
of S. Pier Gattolini; this partnership began presumably about the year
1490.
Conscious that they were not perfected by Cosimo's teaching, they both
set themselves to undergo a strict discipline in art, and, friends as
they were, their paths began to diverge from this point. Their natural
tastes led them to opposite schools--Baccio to the sacred shrine of art
in the shadowed church, Mariotto to the greenery and sunshine of the
Medici garden, where beauty of nature and classic treasures were heaped
in profusion; whose loggie [Footnote: Arched colonnades.] glowed with
the finest forms of Greek sculpture, resuscitated from the tombs of ages
to inspire newer artists to perfection, but alas! also to debase the aim
of purely Christian art.
Baccio's calm devotional mind no doubt disliked the turmoil of this
garden, crowded with spirited youths; the tone of pagan art was not in
accordance with his ideal, and so he learned from Masaccio and Lippi
that love of true form and harmonious composition, which he perfected
afterwards by a close study of Leonardo da Vinci, whose principles
of _chiaroscuro_ he seems to have completely carried out. With this
training he rose to such great celebrity even in his early manhood, that
Rosini [Footnote: Rosini, _Storia della Pittura_, chap. xvii. p.
48.] calls him "the star of the Florentine school in Leonardo and
Michelangelo's absence," and he attained a grandeur almost equal to the
latter, in the S. Mark and SS. Peter and Paul of his later years.
Meanwhile Mariotto was revelling in the Eden of art, drawing
daily beneath the Loggie--where the orange-trees grew close to the
pillars--from the exquisite statues and "torsi," peopling the shades
with white forms, or copying cartoons by the older masters, which hung
against the walls.
The _custode_ of all these treasures was Bertoldo, an old sculptor, who
boasted of having been the scholar of Donatello, and also heir to
his art possessions. He could also point to the bronze pulpits of San
Lorenzo, which he finished, as proof of his having inherited a portion
of his master's spirit. Bertoldo, having doubtless rendered to Duke
Cosimo's keeping his designs by Donatello, which were preserved in the
garden, obtained the post of instructor there; but his age may have
prevented his keeping perfect order, and the younger spirits overpowered
him. There were Michelangelo, with all the youthful power of passion
and force which he afterwards imparted to his works, and the audacious
Torrigiano, with his fierce voice, huge bulk, and knitted brows, who
was himself a discord like the serpent in Eden. Easily offended, he
was prompt in offering outrage. Did any other young man show talent or
surpass him, revenge deep and mean as that of Bandinelli to Michelangelo
was sure to follow, the envied work being spoiled in his rage. Then
there were the fun-loving Francesco Granacci, and the witty Rustici, as
full of boyish pranks as they were of genius--what could one old man
do among so many?--and now comes the impetuous Mariotto to add one more
unruly member to his class.
How well one can imagine the young men--in loose blouses confined at the
waist, or in buff jerkins and close-fitting hose, with jaunty cloaks or
doublets, and little red or black caps, set on flowing locks cut square
in front--passing beneath the shadows of the arches among the dim
statues, or crossing the garden in the sunshine amid the orange-trees,
under the splendid blue Italian skies.
We can see them painting, modelling, or drawing large cartoons in
charcoal, while old Bertoldo passes from easel to easel, criticising and
fault-finding, detailing for the hundredth time Donatello's maxims, and
moving on, heedless or deaf to the irreverent jokes of his ungrateful
pupils.
Then, like a vision of power and grandeur, Lorenzo il Magnifico enters
with a group of his classic friends. Politian and the brothers Pulci
admire again the ancient sculptures which are to them as illustrations
of their readings, and Lorenzo notes the works of all the students who
were destined to contribute to the glory of the many Medicean palaces.
How the burly Torrigiano's heart burns within him when the Duke praises
his compeer's works!
Sometimes Madonna Alfonsina, the mother of Lorenzo, and widow of Piero,
walked here, and she also took an interest in the studies of the
youths. Mariotto especially attracted her by his talent and zeal. She
commissioned him to paint some pictures for her to send as a present to
her own family, the Orsini of Rome. These works, of which the subjects
are not known, passed afterwards into the possession of Cæsar Borgia.
She also sat to Mariotto for her own portrait. It is easily imagined how
elated the excitable youth became at this notice from the mother of the
magnificent Lorenzo. He had dreams of making a greater name than even
his master, Cosimo, whose handiwork was in the Sistine; of excelling
Michelangelo, of whose genius the world was beginning to talk; and, as
adhering to a party was the only way to success in those days, he became
a strong Pallesco, [Footnote: The Palleschi were the partizans of the
Medici, so called because they took as their standard the Palle, or
Balls, the arms of that family.] trusting wholly in the favour of
Madonna Alfonsina.
He even absented himself almost constantly from the studio, which Baccio
shared with him, and worked at the Medici palace, [Footnote: This break
is signified by Baldinucci, _Opere_, vol. iv. p. 84, and by Vasari, who
says that after the exile of Piero he returned to Baccio.] but, alas! in
1494 this brilliant aspect of his fortunes changed.
Lorenzo being dead, Piero de' Medici was banished, the great palace fell
into the hands of the republican Signoria, and all the painters were
left without patronage.
Mariotto, very much cast down, bethought himself of a friend who never
failed him, and whose love was not affected by party; and, returning to
the house of Baccio, he set to work, most likely in a renewed spirit of
confidence in the comrade who stood by him when the princes in whom he
trusted failed him. Whatever his frame of mind, he began now to study
earnestly the works of Baccio, who, while he was seeking patronage
in the palace, had been purifying his genius in the Church. Mariotto
imbibed more and more of Baccio's style, till their works so much
resembled one another that indifferent judges could scarcely distinguish
them apart. It would be interesting if we could see those early pictures
done for Madonna Alfonsina, and compare them with the style formed after
this second adherence to Fra Bartolommeo. What his manner afterwards
became we have a proof in the _Salutation_ (1503), in which there is
grand simplicity of motive combined with the most extreme richness of
execution and fullest harmony of colour.
This second union between the friends could not have been so
satisfactory to either as the first pure boyish love, when they had been
full of youthful hopes, and felt their hearts expand with the dreams
and visions of genius. Now instead of the mere differences between two
styles of art, there were differences which much more seriously affected
their characters; they were daily sundering, one going slowly towards
the cloister, the other to the world. Albertinelli had gained a greater
love of worldly success and luxury.
Baccio's mind, always attuned to devotion, was now intensified by family
sorrows, which no doubt brought him nearer to heaven. Thus softened,
he had the more readily received the seeds of faith which Savonarola
scattered broadcast.
Yet though every word of the one was a wound to the other, this
strangely assorted pair of friends did not part. Rosini well defined
their union as "a knot which binds more strongly by pulling contrary
ways." [Footnote: _Storia della Pittura,_ chap. xvii. p. 48]
So when Albertinelli, while colouring with zeal a design of Baccio's,
would inveigh against all monks, the Dominicans in particular, and
Savonarola especially, his friend would argue that the inspired prophet
was not an enemy, but a purifier and reformer of art. Probably Baccio
was at the Duomo on that Sunday in Lent, 1495, and reported to Mariotto
those wondrous words of Savonarola, that "Beauty ought never to be
taken apart from the true and good," and how, after quoting the same
sentiments from Socrates and Plato, the preacher went on to say, "True
beauty is neither in form nor colour, but in light. God is light, and
His creatures are the more lovely as they approach the nearer to Him in
beauty. And the body is the more beautiful according to the purity of
the soul within it." Certain it is that this divine light lived ever
after in the paintings of Fra Bartolommeo.
He frequented the cloisters of San Marco, where even Lorenzo de' Medici
used to go and hear the prior expound Christianity near the rose tree.
There were Lorenzo di Credi and Sandro Botticelli, both middle-aged men,
of a high standing as artists; there were the Delia Robbias, father and
son, and several others. Sandro, while listening, must have taken in the
inspired words with the scent and beauty of the roses, whose spirit he
gives in so many of his paintings.
Young Baccio, on the contrary, feasted his eyes on the speaker's face,
till the very soul within it was imprinted on his mind, from whence he
reproduced it in that marvellous likeness, the year after the martyrdom
of Savonarola.
This is the earliest known work of Fra Bartolommeo, and is a faithful
portrait; the deep-sunk eye-socket, and eye like an internal fire,
showing the preacher's powerful mind; the prominent aquiline nose and
dilating vehement nostril bespeaking his earnestness and decision; the
large full mouth alone shows the timorousness which none but himself
knew of, so overpowered was it by his excitable spirit. The handling is
Baccio's own able style, but Sig. Cavalcaselle thinks the influences
of Cosimo Roselli are apparent in the low tone and clouded translucent
colour; he signed it "Hieronymi Ferrariensis, a Deo missi prophetæ
effigies," a legend which expresses the more than reverence which
Baccio cherished for the preacher. This portrait has only lately
been identified by its present possessor, Sig. Ermolao Rubieri, who
discovered the legend under a coat of paint. Its vicissitudes are
traceable from the time when Sig. Averardo (or, as Vasari calls him,
Alamanno) Salviati brought it back from Ferrara, where no doubt it had
been in the possession of Savonarola's family. Salviati gave it to
the convent of San Vincenzo at Prato, from which place Sig. Rubieri
purchased it in 1810. The likeness of the reformer in the Belle Arti of
Florence has been supposed to be this one, but it is more likely to be
the one done by Fra Bartolommeo at Pian di Mugnone in after years, when
he drew the friar as S. Peter Martyr, with the wound on his head.