Sunday, October 9, 2016

Baccio della Porta (Fra Bartolomeo) 16th century

Fra Bartolomeo
Preparatory drawing for St Mark in niche
ca. 1514
drawing
British Museum

Fra Bartolomeo
St Mark in niche
1515
Palazzo Pitti, Florence

"One of Florence's major collaborative enterprises was based in the monastery of San Marco, where Fra Bartolomeo oversaw a team of assistants and also worked in partnership with the master painter Mariotto Albertinelli (1474-1515). ... Few contemporaries so unreservedly embraced Leonardo's sfumato and his pursuit of tonal unity. ... The devices Bartolomeo adopted from Leonardo and Michelangelo give his figures a surprisingly sculptural presence, as though the goal of devotional painting were to create a literal 'object' of devotion."

 Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, A New History of Italian Renaissance Art (London : Thames & Hudson, 2012)

Fra Bartolomeo
Minerva in niche
ca. 1510-20
Louvre

Fra Bartolomeo & workshop
Design for a monument to a Cardinal
16th century
drawing
British Museum

Fra Bartolomeo & Mariotto Albertinelli
Annunciation
1511
Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva

Fra Bartolomeo
Drapery study (draped mannequin)
16th century
drawing
Rijksmuseum

Fra Bartolomeo
Madonna with Six Saints
1511-12
Besançon Cathedral

"The rise and proliferation of independent panel painting was a relatively late development in Western Christian art, following the postcrusade importation of Byzantine icons in significant numbers from the thirteenth century on. Until the later Middle Ages, painting in the West was most often used to adorn the outer surfaces of other, more scared things, like reliquaries, altar frontals, church walls, and sculpture itself. But from the thirteenth century, and especially in Italy, painting began to assert its autonomy  peeling itself away from those surfaces, as it were  and to displace sculpture and other sacred objects at the center of Christian worship. In this light, it is possible to see the intensive exploration of illusionistic devices in the painting of this period – through the history of early Renaissance art  as part of a compensatory drive to take over the claims of sculpture and architecture. The rise of painting in this period was a highly improbable, surprise victory. This affected the forms painting took, and eventually the debates surrounding its role in religious life."

– Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

workshop of Fra Bartolomeo
Drapery study (draped mannequin)
ca. 1512-17
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fra Bartolomeo
Incarnation with Six Saints
1515
Louvre

Fra Bartolomeo
Study for The Presentation
1490s
drawing
British Museum

Fra Bartolomeo
Rest on the Flight into Egypt
ca. 1500
Palazzo Vescovile, Pienza

Fra Bartolomeo
Preparatory drawing for Christ as Salvator Mundi
1516-17
drawing
Rijksmuseum

Fra Bartolomeo
Nativity
ca. 1504-07
Art Institute of Chicago

Fra Bartolomeo
Job
ca. 1516
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Text displayed on scroll is from the Book of Job, verse 13:16  IPSE ERIT SALVATOR MEUS ("He shall be my Savior")