Fra Bartolomeo

Fra Bartolommeo certainly would have felt an affinity for Lecceto, a town southwest of Florence with a small oratory and hermitage founded in 1473 by a Dominican friar from San Marco who retired to live the vita contemplativa in the countryside among the rural holdings of the city’s nobility. The merchant Piero Pugliese initially supported the effort, but around 1477 the wealthier Filippo di Matteo Strozzi stepped up to become the lead patron. The church of Santa Maria del Lecceto was consecrated in 1481 and finished around 1489. In 1485, the property passed into the holdings of San Marco along with two other hospices also depicted in drawings by Fra Bartolommeo, Santa Maria del Sasso in Bibbiena and Santa Maria Maddalena in Caldine.¹

With clean strokes of a sharp quill, this study details the Lecceto hospice, which served as place of respite for retired or traveling Dominicans as well as a summer retreat for the Florentine friars of San Marco. While Fra Bartolommeo executed an altarpiece for Santa Maria Maddalena and painted frescoes in the convent while staying there, he does not seem to have produced a work for Lecceto. The church already contained an impressive array of altarpieces by his contemporaries Piero di Cosimo, Bernardo Rosselli, and Domenico Ghirlandaio, all installed in the 1480s.²

The friar’s precise penwork accords perfectly with the geometric simplicity of the structures at Lecceto and the spare elements of the landscape to make this view particularly appealing. He used both sides of the sheet to record the Lecceto complex from different vantages. The sheet is unusual in its pictorial effect: in other studies of hospices, he typically sketched a second view either above or below the first or with the sheet turned 180 degrees, rendering the pages more akin to study sheets. The view on the verso here shows the west wing of Santa Maria del Lecceto completed and the north wing construction under way. This snapshot of the church’s building campaign, which is documented in payment records, indicates a date for the sheet between 1498 and 1504.³

Albert Elen noted that around 1500 the Venetian Jacopo Bellini and his son Giovanni were the boldest and most original landscape draftsmen of the moment, while the Florentine friar’s landscape drawings were based on direct observation to a greater degree and incorporated fewer fantastic elements.⁴ Not all of Fra Bartolommeo’s landscapes were drawn from life—some were based on earlier drafts and worked up in the studio—nor were they all topographically accurate, but they generally hew close to the observed world. Fra Bartolommeo was nonetheless critical in establishing in Tuscany the genre of pure landscape, although historically he has not been thought of as a landscape artist. Until the second half of the twentieth century his reputation as a draftsman was based on the contents of two albums containing nearly five hundred figure studies.

In 1957 a third album surfaced, this one containing landscape drawings— including the present sheet—and was notoriously dismembered and sold.⁵ The vellum-bound album contained forty-one sheets by the artist (out of forty-three sheets in total). The contents were mostly studies in pen and ink, and the range of subjects included distant views such as this one as well as close-up studies of rocks and trees and numerous depictions of architecture integrated into the landscape.⁶ Like the albums of figure drawings, the landscape studies had been purchased from the Convent of Santa Caterina and assembled and bound by Niccolò Gabburri around 1725–30. Oddly, the landscape album bore a title page attributing the studies to Andrea del Sarto (it is no surprise to find that Mariette disparaged Gabburri’s skill as a connoisseur). Gabburri was a Florentine nobleman who practiced as an artist and collected drawings while preparing his manuscript for an unpublished Vite dei pittori. That the friar’s drawings passed from his workshop through the hands of pupils and into Gabburri’s collection argues for the robust role they played in artistic education—or, at the least, appreciation—for centuries following his death.

—JT

Footnotes:

1. View of the Ospizio of Santa Maria del Sasso, Albertina, Vienna, inv. 17.578; View of the Ospizio di Santa Maria Maddalena at Caldine, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, inv. 1957.59.
2. Piero di Cosimo, Madonna and Child Enthroned with SS. Peter, John the Baptist, Dominic, and Nicholas of Bari, 1480–85, St. Louis Art Museum; Bernardo Rosselli, Pietà, 1487, in situ; Domenico Ghirlandaio, Madonna and Child with Angels, and SS. John and James, 1487–88, unlo- cated. A predella panel by Ghirlandaio’s workshop depicting the Nativity is in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
3. Account books were kept by Strozzi and Guerrucci. The campanile was apparently destroyed in 1563 by a lightning strike. See Geronimus 2006, 194–96, and Lillie 2005, 88–91.
4. Elen 1995, 76–77.
5. Sotheby’s, London, 20 November 1957. See Jeudwine 1957 and Fischer 1989.
6. The Morgan preserves another sheet from the album, Barren Pollarded Mulberry and Small Thorn Trees, with a Barren Tree on the verso. Thaw Collection, inv. 2017.2. See New York and Williamstown 2017–18, 34–35, no. 6.