nd that
appreciation will be the more perfect in proportion as a man is the more
fully penetrated with its dominant idea, and with the attendant
circumstances that bring this home to him. It is not against an abstract
enemy that the intercession of the celestial powers is here invoked: it is
not by a caprice of the painter or his patron that, in the group of
central figures, S. Anne attracts attention before the Holy Virgin, not
only by reason of her pre-eminence, but also through the intensity of her
heavenward prayer, and again through her beauty, which far surpasses that
of nearly all "Madonnas" painted by Fra Bartolommeo."[233] But artist and
patron had indeed good reason, in this crisis of the Commonwealth, to
select as the most eminent advocate for Florence at the bar of Heaven that
saint, on whose day, July 26, 1343, had been celebrated the emancipation
of the city from its servitude to Walter of Brienne.

The great event of Fra Bartolommeo's life was the impression produced on
him by Savonarola.[234] Having listened to the Dominican's terrific
denunciations of worldliness and immorality, he carried his life studies
to the pyre of vanities, resolved to assume the cowl, and renounced his
art. Between 1499, when he was engaged in painting the "Last Judgment" of
S. Maria Nuova, and 1506, he is supposed never to have touched the pencil.
When he resumed it Savonarola had been burned for heresy, and Fra
Bartolommeo was a brother in his convent of S. Marco. Savonarola has
sometimes been described as an iconoclast, obstinately hostile to the fine
arts. This is by no means a true account of the crusade he carried on
against the pagan sensuality of his contemporaries. He desired that art
should remain the submissive handmaid of the Church and the willing
servant of pure morality. While he denounced the heathenism of the style
in vogue at Florence, and forbade the study of the nude, he strove to
encourage religious painting, and established a school for its exercise in
the cloister of S. Marco. It was in this monastic _bottega_ that Fra
Bartolommeo, in concert with his friend Albertinelli, worked for the
benefit of the convent after the year 1506. The reforms Savonarola
attempted in the fine arts as in manners, by running counter to the
tendencies of the Renaissance at a moment when society was too corrupt to
be regenerated, and the passion for antiquity was too powerful to be
restrained, proved of necessity ineffective. It