The room which leads from this one is much less valuable; but Fra Bartolommeo’s Vision of S. Bernard has lately been brought to an easel here to give it character.  I find this the Frate’s most beautiful work.  It may have details that are a little crude, and the pointed nose of the Virgin is not perhaps in accordance with the best tradition, while she is too real for an apparition; but the figure of the kneeling saint is masterly and the landscape lovely in subject and feeling.  Here too is Fra Bartolommeo’s portrait of Savonarola, in which the reformer is shown as personating S. Peter Martyr.  The picture was not painted from life, but from an earlier portrait.  Fra Bartolommeo had some reason to know what Savonarola was like, for he was his personal friend and a brother in the same convent of S. Marco, a few yards from the Accademia, across the square.  He was born in 1475 and was apprenticed to the painter Cosimo Rosselli; but he learned more from studying Masaccio’s frescoes at the Carmine and the work of Leonardo da Vinci.  It was in 1495 that he came under the influence of Savonarola, and he was the first artist to run home and burn his studies from the nude in response to the preacher’s denunciations.  Three years later, when Savonarola was an object of hatred and the convent of S. Marco was besieged, the artist was with him, and he then made a vow that if he lived he would join the order; and this promise he kept, although not until Savonarola had been executed.  For a while, as a monk, he laid aside the brush, but in 1506 he resumed it and painted until his death, in 1517.  He was buried at S. Marco.

In his less regenerate days Fra Bartolommeo’s greatest friend was the jovial Mariotto Albertinelli, whose rather theatrical Annunciation hangs between a number of the monk’s other portraits, all very interesting.  Of Albertinelli I have spoken earlier.  Before leaving, look at the tiny Ignoto next the door—­a Madonna and Child, the child eating a pomegranate.  It is a little picture to steal.

In the next room are a number of the later and showy painters, such as Carlo Dolci, Lorenzo Lippi, and Francesco Furini, all bold, dashing, self-satisfied hands, in whom (so near the real thing) one can take no interest.  Nothing to steal here.

Returning through Sala Prima we come to the Sala del Perugino and are among the masters once more—­riper and richer than most of those we have already seen, for Tuscan art here reaches its finest flower.  Perugino is here and Botticelli, Fra Bartolommeo and Leonardo, Luca Signorelli, Fra Lippo Lippi and Filippino Lippi.  And here is a Masaccio.  The great Perugino Assumption has all his mellow sunset calm, and never was a landscape more tenderly sympathetic.  The same painter’s Deposition hangs next, and the custodian brings a magnifying glass that the tears on the Magdalen’s cheek may be more closely observed; but the third, No. 53, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, is finer, and here again the landscape and light are perfect.  For the rest, there is a Royal Academy Andrea and a formal Ghirlandaio.