Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
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Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
Venice in 1506--for the rest of his life, being buried there at last in
1517.
Six pictures from his hand hang to-day in the Pitti,--a Holy Family
(256), the beautiful Deposition (64), an Ecce Homo in fresco (377), the
Marriage of St. Catherine, painted in 1512 (208), a St. Mark, painted in
1514 (125), and Christ and the Four Evangelists, painted in 1516 (159).
The unpleasing "Madonna appearing to St. Bernard," painted in 1506, now
in the Accademia, was his first work after he became a friar.
Here, in the Pitti, Bartolommeo is not at his best; for his earlier and
more delicate manner, so full of charm and a sort of daintiness, one
must go to Lucca, where his picture of Madonna with St. Stephen and St.
John Baptist hangs in the Duomo. The grand and almost pompous works in
Florence, splendid though they may be in painting, in composition, in
colour, scarcely move us at all, so that it might almost seem that in
following Savonarola he lost not the world only but his art also, that
refined and delicate art which comes to us so gently in his earliest
pictures. Something passionate and pathetic, truly, may be found in the
Pieta here, together with a certain dramatic effectiveness that is rare
in his work. With what an effort, for instance, has St. John lifted the
body of his Master from the great cross in the background, how
passionately Mary Magdalen has flung herself at His feet; yet the
picture seems to be without any real significance, without spirituality
certainly, only another colossal group of figures that even Michelangelo
has refused to carve.
[Illustration: PIETA
_By Fra Bartolomeo. Pitti Gallery_
_Anderson_]
On coming to the work of Raphael, to the work of Titian, we find the
great treasure of the Pitti Gallery, beside which the rest is but a
background: it is for them really, after all, that we have come here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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