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Date : approx. between 1504 and 1507
Material : Oil painting on wood
Acquisition : Various donors (2005)
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European Painting
Painting
Area related
Italy
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| Description |  |
One of the major High Renaissance masters in Florence along with Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Fra Bartolommeo looked to their most lyrical and harmonious works in developing his own delicate and intimate style. After his initial artistic training and practice, the young Baccio della Porta came under the spell of the ardently pious Domenican friar Girolamo Savonarola, joining his monastic order as Fra (Friar) Bartolommeo and forsaking his painting career for several years. When he returned to his easel in 1504, he began to invest his pictures, such as this beautifully preserved Nativity of Christ, with a new, intense, if quiet, spirituality and sense of private devotion. Accordingly, the artist isolated the adoring Virgin in profile against the backdrop of a sensitively observed rural village that attests to Fra Bartolommeo's place among the most gifted landscape painters of his day.
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