Presentation of Christ in the Temple

Fra Bartolomeo was a Dominican friar, and he painted this in 1516 for the novices' chapel of San Marco in Florence, the same convent where the preacher Savonarola had led the friars before he was burned in the square outside in 1498. By 1516 that storm had passed, and the painting is calm and weighty: full figures, a slow rhythm, deep steady color. It shows the infant Christ brought to the temple, held out to the old priest Simeon while the prophetess Anna looks on. It may have been ordered by Pope Leo X, a Florentine Medici, for the feast of Epiphany that year. Fra Bartolomeo died the next year. In 1792 the picture was traded away to Vienna, where it hangs today.