Bartolomeo della Porta, Fra’

BARTOLOMEO DELLA PORTA, Fra’. - Painter, b. in Florence in 1475, d. at Bagni S. Filippo on 31 Oct. 1517. Knowledge of his early period of activity is scanty, since he himself, moved by the words of Savonarola, destroyed his paintings of secular subjects; he appears in any case bound to fifteenth-century schemes learned in the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli (v.), from which, however, he is already free in the Last Judgment of 1499 (Florence, museum of S. Marco), whose composition in broad planes was to have wide repercussions. With this work he interrupted his activity, following the political events and the death of Savonarola, in order to enter as a novice (1500) the Order of the Dominicans. He began painting again in 1504 with the apparition of the Virgin to St. Bernard; at this time he came into contact with the art of Leonardo and of Michelangelo, and he drew close to the forms of the one and the other, not remaining a stranger even to the manners of Perugino and of Raphael. He nevertheless saw these different manners (as also the color, for which the journey to Venice in 1508 is held to be very important) as serving that plasticism proper to the Florentine tradition to which his temperament kept him bound. Both in the first and in the second period of his activity up to 1511, he often worked in collaboration with Mariotto Albertinelli.

His balance as a composer was, only for a short time, under Roman influence (1512), altered by a search for monumentality (see St. Peter and St. Paul, Vatican Pinacoteca; St. Mark in the Pitti gallery; Virgin of Mercy at Lucca); in his last years he returned to his old schemes. Still deserving of mention are: The Pietà in the Pitti gallery; The Presentation in the Temple in the Vienna gallery; The Marriage of St. Catherine in the Uffizi, besides the numerous admirable drawings in various public and private collections.

Maria Donati