Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/341

1517] are exceedingly rich in colour, and show the mastery of chiaroscuro which the painter had acquired from the study of Leonardo's style. In his fresco of the Last Judgment, Fra Bartolommeo had already revealed himself as a master of great and original power. This imposing design forms, as it were, a link between the old world and the new, and takes us back, on the one hand, to the mediæval conceptions of early Tuscan masters in the Campo Santo, while on the other it points onward to Raphael's Disputa. Now, under the irresistible might of Leonardo's influence, the Dominican artist advances a step further and becomes the representative of the modern style, with its abstract types, its scientific disposition of groups and masses of light and shade, its grand and monumental composition.

In 1509, the year in which these two masterpieces were completed, Fra Bartolommeo took his old friend and associate Mariotto Albertinelli into partnership with him once more. Now that Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were all absent, the Dominican master had more orders than he knew how to execute, and found himself the most popular painter in Florence. A contract was drawn up between the Prior of San Marco and Albertinelli, by which the convent was to supply the necessary materials, and on the dissolution of the partnership, the works painted by both artists were to be sold, and the profits divided between them. The pictures which the two masters painted separately bear their respective signatures, while the works which they executed jointly, are inscribed with a monogram of the cross between two rings. For three years the two artists