In the second room are chiefly works by Fra Bartolommeo and Mariotto
Albertinelli. By the Frate, are the series of heads of Christ and
Saints (168), excepting the Baptist on the right; they are frescoes
taken from San Marco, excepting the Christ on the left, inscribed
"Orate pro pictore 1514," which is in oil on canvas. Also by him are
the two frescoes of Madonna and Child (171, 173), and the splendid
portrait of Savonarola in the character of St. Peter Martyr (172), the
great religious persecutor of the Middle Ages, to whom Fra Girolamo
had a special devotion. By Albertinelli, are the Madonna and Saints
(167), and the Annunciation (169), signed and dated 1510. This room
also contains several pictures by Fra Paolino da Pistoia and the
Dominican nun, Plautilla Nelli, two pious but insipid artists, who
inherited Fra Bartolommeo's drawings and tried to carry on his
traditions. On a stand in the middle of the room, is Domenico
Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds (195), from Santa Trinità, a
splendid work with--as Vasari puts it--"certain heads of shepherds
which are held a divine thing."
On the walls of the third room are later pictures of no importance or
significance. But in the middle of the room is another masterpiece by
Ghirlandaio (66); the Madonna and Child with two Angels, Thomas
Aquinas and Dionysius standing on either side of the throne, Dominic
and Clement kneeling. It is seldom, indeed, that this prosaic painter
succeeded in creating such a thinker as this Thomas, such a mystic as
this Dionysius; in the head of the latter we see indeed the image of
the man who, according to the pleasant mediæval fable eternalised by
Dante, "in the flesh below, saw deepest into the Angelic nature and
its ministry."
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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