Album «Fra Bartolommeo»

In 1922, Léon Bonnat bequeathed to the Louvre a wonderful album of almost forty drawings by one of the most famous painters of the Florentine Renaissance: Baccio della Porta, known as Fra Bartolommeo (1469-1517). The collection traces the career of the artist, who trained in Florence around 1485 with Cosimo Rosselli, but above all in the shadow of the most brilliant workshop of the period, that of Andrea del Verrocchio. Sensitive to the prodigious innovations coming out of this extraordinary environment, which had produced such geniuses as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Leonardo da Vinci in the previous decade, Baccio, as he was then known, studied above all with Lorenzo di Credi, to whom Verrocchio had entrusted the running of the workshop when he left Florence for Venice. Baccio also closely followed all the great Florentine painters of the last decade of the fifteenth century, in particular the works of foreigners who had been in Florence for several years, especially Pietro Perugino, and those of Ghirlandaio’s workshop, then at the height of their popularity. The two volumes accurately reproduce the almost forty drawings in the Louvre album accompanied by a commentary written by two museum specialists.

Text in French.