Fra Bartolomeo

In 1497 a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola had the people of Florence pile their vanities on a bonfire in the main square: mirrors, fine clothes, playing cards, and paintings. Among those who threw work on the fire was a promising young painter, Baccio della Porta, who burned his own studies of nudes.

When Savonarola was hanged and burned the next year, the shock ran deep. Baccio entered the Dominican order, took the name Fra Bartolomeo, and for several years gave up painting altogether. He came back to it at the friary of San Marco, now making calm, weighty altarpieces of the Virgin and saints, their draperies broad and their spaces built with a new sense of air.

He and the young Raphael, briefly in Florence around 1505, learned from each other, Raphael absorbing his soft modelling of light while he took up Raphael's command of perspective. To arrange the heavy folds of cloth in his big altarpieces he is said to have used a life-size jointed lay figure, a wooden mannequin he could pose and drape at will.