Fra Bartolomeo

According to Vasari, Fra Bartolommeo left his drawings to his pupil Fra Paolino da Pistoia (Vasari ed. Milanesi 1878-85, 4: 103; Vasari ed. Everyman 1994, 1: 680). Upon Fra Paolino’s death in 1547, the drawings passed to his pupil Suor Plautilla Nelli, a Dominican nun of the monastery of Santa Caterina in Florence. Later, Filippo Baldinucci further reports that approximately 500 of these drawings were in the collection of the painter-collector Cavaliere Gabburri in Florence (1845-47, 2: 589-90). In an unpublished manuscript, Gabburri wrote that he had placed his approximately 600 Bartolommeo drawings in two albums. These volumes have been identified as those now in at the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. According to the text at the beginning of the first volume, they contain drawings by Fra Bartolommeo bough in 1727 from the nuns of the convent of Santa Caterina.

The present sheet was part of a third Gabburri album, assembled in 1730 and bearing Gabburri’s coat of arms on the frontispiece. The album contained forty-one sheets of drawings of landscapes and trees by Fra Bartolommeo. The album together with Gabburri’s entire collection passed to the English art dealer William Kent who sold it in London in the mid-eighteenth century. It was later taken apart for the 1957 London sale and the drawings sold as individual lots (see also inv. 1957.18).

Fra Bartolommeo’s landscape album constitutes one of the earliest significant bodies of plein-air landscape drawings. He made these drawings during his travels in Tuscany, yet only a handful of the sketches reappear as background elements in his paintings, suggesting that the drawings were made for his own pleasure, and not as a model-book type of reference. Nonetheless, having made such drawings, the artist painted landscape backgrounds that have an understanding of tree and rock formations not seen in the more schematic depictions by his contemporaries. It is also indicative of Fra Bartomeo’s all-absorbing vision that he focused not merely on untouched nature but also on nature as affected by human artistry, as seen in his study of a heavily pollarded tree, which could be contrasted with the more naturally growing tree (probably of the same type) on the opposite side of the sheet.