Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/339

1517] painted; several arbiters were called in, and it was not till 1507 that the painter finally received the sum of 100 florins.

In 1504, the same year in which Fra Bartolommeo resumed the practice of his art, Raphael came to Florence and was deeply impressed by the Dominican artist's fresco of the Last Judgment. He sought out Fra Bartolommeo and was constantly in his company, being anxious to learn the secret of his fine colour and his method of handling oils. Many of Raphael's works at this period, especially the fresco in S. Severo at Perugia, and the Madonna of S. Antonio, now in America, bear witness to the attention with which he studied Fra Bartolommeo's modelling and composition, and even in his drawings he adopted the charcoal which the friar employed habitually. On his part, Fra Bartolommeo felt the power of the great Urbinate's spell, and the fresco of the Madonna clasping the Child in her arms which he painted on the wall of Savonarola's cell in San Marco, closely resembles Raphael's Casa Tempi Madonna, at Munich. The influence of Leonardo, who was engaged about this time on the fresco in the Council Hall, is even more evident in the masterly drawings by the friar's hand which are to be found in the Uffizi and other galleries, and it was the close study of this artist's works which produced the next development of Fra Bartolommeo's style. To this period we may also ascribe the fresco of the Crucifixion in the Refectory of San Marco, and the lunette in which the friar repeats Fra Angelico's well-known subject of Christ and his disciples at Emmaus, and introduces the portraits of his friend the Prior and of Fra Niccolo, afterwards Cardinal Schomberg.