and sobriety.  All that he lacks, is the boldness of imagination, the depth of passion, and the power of thought, that are indispensable to genius of the highest order.  Gifted with a sympathetic and a pliant, rather than a creative and self-sustained nature, he was sensitive to every influence.  Therefore we find him learning much in his youth from Lionardo, deriving a fresh impulse from Raphael, and endeavouring in his later life, after a visit to Rome in 1514, to “heighten his style,” as the phrase went, by emulating Michael Angelo.  The attempt to tread the path of Buonarroti was a failure.  What Fra Bartolommeo sought to gain in majesty, he lost in charm.  His was essentially a pure and gracious manner, upon which sublimity could not be grafted.  The gentle soul, who dropped his weapon when the convent of S. Marco was besieged by the Compagnacci[229], and who vowed, if heaven preserved him in the tumult, to become a monk, had none of Michael Angelo’s terribilita.  Without possessing some share of that spirit, it was vain to aggrandise the forms and mass the raiment of his prophets in imitation of the Sistine.

Nature made Fra Bartolommeo the painter of adoration[230].  His masterpiece at Lucca—­the “Madonna della Misericordia”—­is a poem of glad worship, a hymn of prayerful praise.  Our Lady stands elate, between earth and heaven, appealing to her Son for mercy.  At her footstool are her suppliants, the men and women and little children of the city she has saved.  The peril is past.  Salvation has been won; and the song of thanksgiving ascends from all those massed and mingled forms in unison.  Not less truly is the great unfinished picture of “Madonna surrounded by the Patron Saints of Florence” a poem of adoration[231].  This painting was ordered by the Gonfalonier Piero Soderini, the man who dedicated Florence to Christ as King.  He intended it to take its place in the hall of the Consiglio Grande, where Michael Angelo and Lionardo gained their earliest laurels.  Before it could be finished, the Republic perished.[232] “That,” says Rio, “is the reason why he left but an imperfect work—­for those at least who are only struck by what is wanting in it.  Others will at first regard it with the interest attaching to unfinished poems, interrupted by the jailer’s call or by the stern voice of the executioner.  Then they will study it in all its details, in order to appreciate its beauties; and that appreciation will be the more perfect in proportion as a man is the more fully penetrated with its dominant idea, and with the attendant circumstances that bring this home to him.  It is not against an abstract enemy that the intercession of the celestial powers is here invoked:  it is not by a caprice of the painter or his patron that, in the group of central figures, S. Anne attracts attention before the Holy Virgin, not only by reason of her pre-eminence, but also through the intensity of her heavenward prayer, and again through her beauty, which far surpasses that of nearly all “Madonnas” painted by Fra Bartolommeo."[233] But artist and patron had indeed good reason, in this crisis of the Commonwealth, to select as the most eminent advocate for Florence at the bar of Heaven that saint, on whose day, July 26, 1343, had been celebrated the emancipation of the city from its servitude to Walter of Brienne.