any longer his work.  Thus it is at last as the painter of the Annunziata and the Scalzo that we must think of him, which, full of grandiose and heavy forms and draperies though they are, still please us better than anything else he achieved, save the great Last Supper of S. Salvi and the portraits of himself and his wife.  As a Florentine painter he seems ever among strangers:  it is as an exiled Venetian, one who had been forced by some irony of circumstances to forego his birthright in that invigorating and worldly city, which might have revealed to him just the significance of life which we miss in his pictures, that he appears to us; a failure difficult to explain, a weak but beautiful nature spoiled by mediocrity.

Fra Bartolommeo was another Florentine who seems, for a moment at any rate, to have been bewildered by the influence of Michelangelo, but as a profound conviction saved him from insincerity, so his splendid sensuality preserved his work from sentimentalism.  Born about 1475 at Savignano, not far from Prato, his father sent him to Florence, placing him in the care of Cosimo Rosselli, according to Vasari, but more probably, as we may think, under Piero di Cosimo.  Here he seems to have come under the influence of Leonardo, and to have been friends with Mariotto Albertinelli.  The great influence of his life, however, was Fra Girolamo Savonarola, whom he would often go to S. Marco to hear.  Savonarola was preaching as ever against vanities,—­that is to say, pictures, statues, verses, books:  things doubtless anathema to one whose whole future depended upon the amount of interest he could awaken in himself.  At this time, it seems, Savonarola was asserting his conviction that “in houses where young maidens dwelt it was dangerous and improper to retain pictures wherein there were undraped figures.”  It seems to have been the custom in Florence at the time of the Carnival to build cabins of wood and furze, and on the night of Shrove Tuesday to set them ablaze, while the people danced around them, joining hands, according to ancient custom, amid laughter and songs.  This Savonarola had denounced, and, winning the ear of the people for the moment, he persuaded those who were wont to dance to bring “pictures and works of sculpture, many by the most excellent masters,” and to cast them into the fire, with books, musical instruments, and such.  To this pile, Vasari tells us, Bartolommeo brought all his studies and drawings which he had made from the nude, and threw them into the flames; so also did Lorenzo di Credi and many others, who were called Piagnoni, among them, no doubt, Sandro Botticelli.  The people soon tired, however, of their new vanity, as they had done of the beautiful things they had destroyed at his bidding, and, the party opposed to Savonarola growing dangerous, Bartolommeo with others shut themselves up in S. Marco to guard Savonarola.  Fra Girolamo’s excommunication, torture, and death, which followed soon after, seem finally to