He even absented himself almost constantly from the studio, which Baccio shared with him, and worked at the Medici palace, [Footnote: This break is signified by Baldinucci, Opere, vol. iv. p. 84, and by Vasari, who says that after the exile of Piero he returned to Baccio.] but, alas! in 1494 this brilliant aspect of his fortunes changed.
Lorenzo being dead, Piero de' Medici was banished, the great palace fell into the hands of the republican Signoria, and all the painters were left without patronage.
Mariotto, very much cast down, bethought himself of a friend who never failed him, and whose love was not affected by party; and, returning to the house of Baccio, he set to work, most likely in a renewed spirit of confidence in the comrade who stood by him when the princes in whom he trusted failed him. Whatever his frame of mind, he began now to study earnestly the works of Baccio, who, while he was seeking patronage in the palace, had been purifying his genius in the Church. Mariotto imbibed more and more of Baccio's style, till their works so much resembled one another that indifferent judges could scarcely distinguish them apart. It would be interesting if we could see those early pictures done for Madonna Alfonsina, and compare them with the style formed after this second adherence to Fra Bartolommeo. What his manner afterwards became we have a proof in the Salutation (1503), in which there is grand simplicity of motive combined with the most extreme richness of execution and fullest harmony of colour.
This second union between the friends could not have been so satisfactory to either as the first pure boyish love, when they had been full of youthful hopes, and felt their hearts expand with the dreams and visions of genius. Now instead of the mere differences between two styles of art, there were differences which much more seriously affected their characters; they were daily sundering, one going slowly towards the cloister, the other to the world. Albertinelli had gained a greater love of worldly success and luxury.
Baccio's mind, always attuned to devotion, was now intensified by family sorrows, which no doubt brought him nearer to heaven. Thus softened, he had the more readily received the seeds of faith which Savonarola scattered broadcast.
Yet though every word of the one was a wound to the other, this strangely assorted pair of friends did not part. Rosini well defined their union as "a knot which binds more strongly by pulling contrary ways." [Footnote: Storia della Pittura, chap. xvii. p. 48]
So when Albertinelli, while colouring with zeal a design of Baccio's, would inveigh against all monks, the Dominicans in particular, and Savonarola especially, his friend would argue that the inspired prophet was not an enemy, but a purifier and reformer of art. Probably Baccio was at the Duomo on that Sunday in Lent, 1495, and reported to Mariotto those wondrous words of Savonarola, that "Beauty ought never to be taken apart from the true and good," and how, after quoting the same sentiments from Socrates and Plato, the preacher went on to say, "True beauty is neither in form nor colour, but in light. God is light, and His creatures are the more lovely as they approach the nearer to Him in beauty. And the body is the more beautiful according to the purity of the soul within it." Certain it is that this divine light lived ever after in the paintings of Fra Bartolommeo.
He frequented the cloisters of San Marco, where even Lorenzo de' Medici used to go and hear the prior expound Christianity near the rose tree. There were Lorenzo di Credi and Sandro Botticelli, both middle-aged men, of a high standing as artists; there were the Delia Robbias, father and son, and several others. Sandro, while listening, must have taken in the inspired words with the scent and beauty of the roses, whose spirit he gives in so many of his paintings.
Young Baccio, on the contrary, feasted his eyes on the speaker's face, till the very soul within it was imprinted on his mind, from whence he reproduced it in that marvellous likeness, the year after the martyrdom of Savonarola.
This is the earliest known work of Fra Bartolommeo, and is a faithful portrait; the deep-sunk eye-socket, and eye like an internal fire, showing the preacher's powerful mind; the prominent aquiline nose and dilating vehement nostril bespeaking his earnestness and decision; the large full mouth alone shows the timorousness which none but himself knew of, so overpowered was it by his excitable spirit. The handling is Baccio's own able style, but Sig. Cavalcaselle thinks the influences of Cosimo Roselli are apparent in the low tone and clouded translucent colour; he signed it "Hieronymi Ferrariensis, a Deo missi prophetæ effigies," a legend which expresses the more than reverence which Baccio cherished for the preacher. This portrait has only lately been identified by its present possessor, Sig. Ermolao Rubieri, who discovered the legend under a coat of paint. Its vicissitudes are traceable from the time when Sig. Averardo (or, as Vasari calls him, Alamanno) Salviati brought it back from Ferrara, where no doubt it had been in the possession of Savonarola's family. Salviati gave it to the convent of San Vincenzo at Prato, from which place Sig. Rubieri purchased it in 1810. The likeness of the reformer in the Belle Arti of Florence has been supposed to be this one, but it is more likely to be the one done by Fra Bartolommeo at Pian di Mugnone in after years, when he drew the friar as S. Peter Martyr, with the wound on his head.