The great event of Fra Bartolommeo’s life was the impression produced on him by Savonarola.[234] Having listened to the Dominican’s terrific denunciations of worldliness and immorality, he carried his life studies to the pyre of vanities, resolved to assume the cowl, and renounced his art.  Between 1499, when he was engaged in painting the “Last Judgment” of S. Maria Nuova, and 1506, he is supposed never to have touched the pencil.  When he resumed it Savonarola had been burned for heresy, and Fra Bartolommeo was a brother in his convent of S. Marco.  Savonarola has sometimes been described as an iconoclast, obstinately hostile to the fine arts.  This is by no means a true account of the crusade he carried on against the pagan sensuality of his contemporaries.  He desired that art should remain the submissive handmaid of the Church and the willing servant of pure morality.  While he denounced the heathenism of the style in vogue at Florence, and forbade the study of the nude, he strove to encourage religious painting, and established a school for its exercise in the cloister of S. Marco.  It was in this monastic bottega that Fra Bartolommeo, in concert with his friend Albertinelli, worked for the benefit of the convent after the year 1506.  The reforms Savonarola attempted in the fine arts as in manners, by running counter to the tendencies of the Renaissance at a moment when society was too corrupt to be regenerated, and the passion for antiquity was too powerful to be restrained, proved of necessity ineffective.  It may further be said that the limitations he imposed would have been fatal to the free development of art if they had been observed.

Several painters, besides Fra Baccio, submitted to Savonarola’s influence.  Among these the most distinguished were the pure and gentle Lorenzo di Credi and Sandro Botticelli, who, after the great preacher’s death, is said to have abandoned painting.  Neither Lorenzo di Credi nor Fra Baccio possessed a portion of the prophet’s fiery spirit.  Had that but found expression in their cloistral pictures, one of the most peculiar and characteristic flowers of art the world has ever known, would then have bloomed in Florence.  The mantle of Savonarola, however, if it fell upon any painter, fell on Michael Angelo, and we must seek an echo of the friar’s thunders in the Sistine Chapel.  Fra Bartolommeo was too tender and too timid.  The sublimities of tragic passion lay beyond his scope.  Though I have ventured to call him the painter of adoration, he did not feel even this movement of the soul with the intensity of Fra Angelico.  In the person of S. Dominic kneeling beneath the cross Fra Angelico painted worship as an ecstasy, wherein the soul goes forth with love and pain and yearning beyond any power of words or tears or music to express what it would utter.  To these heights of the ascetic ideal Fra Bartolommeo never soared.  His sobriety bordered upon the prosaic.