BARTOLOMEO, FRA

born March 28, 1472, Florence died Oct. 31, 1517, Florence God the Father with SS. Catherine of Siena and Mary Magdalene, painting by Fra also called Baccio Della Porta painter who was a prominent exponent in early 16th-century Florence of the High Renaissance style. He served as an apprentice in the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli and then formed a workshop with the painter Mariotto Albertinelli. His early works, such as the Annunciation (1497; Volterra Cathedral), were influenced by the balanced compositions of the Umbrian painter Perugino and by the sfumato (smoky effect of light and shade) of Leonardo da Vinci. Saddened by the death of the Florentine Dominican religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola, Bartolomeo joined the Dominican order in 1500 and gave up painting. He began painting again in 1504, and his Vision of St. Bernard (completed 1507; Accademia, Florence) shows him achieving the transition from the subtle grace of late Quattrocento painting to the monumentality of the High Renaissance style. In 1508 Bartolomeo visited Venice, where he assimilated the Venetian painters' use of richer colour harmonies. Back in Florence soon afterward, he painted a number of calm and simple religious pictures in which monumental figures are grouped in balanced compositions and portrayed with a dense and somewhat shadowy atmospheric treatment. Among such works are his God the Father with SS. Catherine of Siena and Mary Magdalene (1509; Pinacoteca Civica, Lucca) and the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (1512; Uffizi, Florence). Bartolomeo visited Rome in 1514, where he saw Raphael's mature work and Michelangelo's frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In response Bartolomeo's art took on a greater power of dramatic expression, as in the Madonna della Misericordia (1515; Pinacoteca Civica) and the Piet (c. 1515; Pitti Palace, Florence). Despite Bartolomeo's assimilation of the progressive currents of his time, his art is restrained, conservative, and somewhat severe, and he painted religious subjects almost exclusively.