have decided the gentle Bartolommeo to assume the religious habit, which he did not long after at S. Domenico in Prato.  Later we find him back in Florence in the Convent of S. Marco, where he is said to have met Raphael and to have learned much from him of the art of perspective.  However that may be, he continued to paint there in S. Marco really—­saving a journey to Rome where he came under the influence of Michelangelo, a visit to S. Martino in Lucca, and his journey to Venice in 1506—­for the rest of his life, being buried there at last in 1517.

Six pictures from his hand hang to-day in the Pitti,—­a Holy Family (256), the beautiful Deposition (64), an Ecce Homo in fresco (377), the Marriage of St. Catherine, painted in 1512 (208), a St. Mark, painted in 1514 (125), and Christ and the Four Evangelists, painted in 1516 (159).  The unpleasing “Madonna appearing to St. Bernard,” painted in 1506, now in the Accademia, was his first work after he became a friar.

Here, in the Pitti, Bartolommeo is not at his best; for his earlier and more delicate manner, so full of charm and a sort of daintiness, one must go to Lucca, where his picture of Madonna with St. Stephen and St. John Baptist hangs in the Duomo.  The grand and almost pompous works in Florence, splendid though they may be in painting, in composition, in colour, scarcely move us at all, so that it might almost seem that in following Savonarola he lost not the world only but his art also, that refined and delicate art which comes to us so gently in his earliest pictures.  Something passionate and pathetic, truly, may be found in the Pieta here, together with a certain dramatic effectiveness that is rare in his work.  With what an effort, for instance, has St. John lifted the body of his Master from the great cross in the background, how passionately Mary Magdalen has flung herself at His feet; yet the picture seems to be without any real significance, without spirituality certainly, only another colossal group of figures that even Michelangelo has refused to carve.

[Illustration:  PIETA

By Fra Bartolomeo.  Pitti Gallery

Anderson]

On coming to the work of Raphael, to the work of Titian, we find the great treasure of the Pitti Gallery, beside which the rest is but a background:  it is for them really, after all, that we have come here.

Raphael Sanzio, the “most beloved name in the history of painting,” was born at Urbino in 1483.  The pupil first of his father maybe, though Giovanni died when his son was but eleven years old, and later of Timoteo Viti, we hear of Raphael first in the bottega of the greatest of the Umbrian painters, Perugino, at Perugia.  Two works of Perugino hang to-day in the Pitti Gallery, the Madonna and Child (219) and the Entombment (164), painted in 1495, for the nuns of S. Chiara.  Vasari has much to say of the latter, relating how Francesco del Pugliare offered to give them three times as much as they had