ciation from his
hand, we shall see how completely the enthusiasm of his early work is
wanting in his later pictures. Something, some divine energy, seems to
have gone out of his life, and ever after he is but trying to revive or
to counterfeit it. Now and then, as in the Disputa (172), which marks
the very zenith of his art, he is almost a great painter, but the
Madonna with six Saints (123), painted in 1524, is already full of
repetitions,--the kneeling figures in the foreground, for instance, that
we find again in the Deposition (58) painted in the same year. Nor in
the Assumption (225) painted in 1526, nor in the later picture (191) of
1531, is there any significance, energy, or beauty: they are
arrangements of draperies, splendid luxurious pictures without sincerity
or emotion. It is not fair to judge him by the St. John Baptist, which
has suffered too much from restoration to be any longer his work. Thus
it is at last as the painter of the Annunziata and the Scalzo that we
must think of him, which, full of grandiose and heavy forms and
draperies though they are, still please us better than anything else he
achieved, save the great Last Supper of S. Salvi and the portraits of
himself and his wife. As a Florentine painter he seems ever among
strangers: it is as an exiled Venetian, one who had been forced by some
irony of circumstances to forego his birthright in that invigorating and
worldly city, which might have revealed to him just the significance of
life which we miss in his pictures, that he appears to us; a failure
difficult to explain, a weak but beautiful nature spoiled by mediocrity.

Fra Bartolommeo was another Florentine who seems, for a moment at any
rate, to have been bewildered by the influence of Michelangelo, but as a
profound conviction saved him from insincerity, so his splendid
sensuality preserved his work from sentimentalism. Born about 1475 at
Savignano, not far from Prato, his father sent him to Florence, placing
him in the care of Cosimo Rosselli, according to Vasari, but more
probably, as we may think, under Piero di Cosimo. Here he seems to have
come under the influence of Leonardo, and to have been friends with
Mariotto Albertinelli. The great influence of his life, however, was Fra
Girolamo Savonarola, whom he would often go to S. Marco to hear.
Savonarola was preaching as ever against vanities,--that is to say,
pictures, statues, verses, books: things doubtless anathema to one whose
who