brouglhit back to Florence not a great while since, and is now in the house of Filippo, the son of Alamanni Salviati, by whom, as being a work of Baccio’s, it is held in the highest estimation.[1]
It happened afterwards that the party opposed to Fra Girolamo rose against him, determining to deliver him into the hands ofjustice, and to make him answerable for the insurrections which he had excited in the city; but the friends of the monk, perceiving their intention, assembled also, to the number of five hundred, and shut themselves up in San Marco; Baccio della Porta joining himself to them, for the very great affection which he bore to Fra Girolamo. It is true that having but very little courage, being indeed of a timid and even cowardly disposition, he lost heart, on hearing the clamours of an attack, which was made upon the convent shortly after, and seeing some wounded and others killed, he began to have grievous doubts respecting his position. Thereupon he made a vow, that if he might be permitted to escape from the rage of that strife, he would instantly assume the religious habit of the Dominicans. The vow thus taken he afterwards fulfilled to the letter; for when the struggle was over, and when the monk, having been taken prisoner, had been condemned to death,[2] as will be found circumstantially related by the historians of the period, Baccio della Porta departed to Prato, where he assumed the habit of San Domenico on the 26th of July, in the year 1500, as we find recorded in the chronicles of that convent. This determination caused much regret to all his friends, who grieved exceedingly at having lost him, and all the more as he had resolved to abandon the study of painting.
At the entreaty of Gerozzo Dini, the friend and companion of Fra Bartolommeo—so did the prior call Baccio della Porta, on investing him with the habit—Mariotto Albertinelli undertook the work abandoned by Baccio, and con-
- ↑ A fine portrait of Savonarola, by Fra Bartolommeo, is now in the Academy of the Fine Arts, in Florence. It has a deep wound on the head, doubtless in allusion to his martyrdom, and is therefore not likely to be that here alluded to, although some annotators appear to consider that it may be the one mentioned by Vasari as in the possession of Filippo Salviati.
- ↑ This martyred reformer was publicly burnt on the 23rd of May, 1498. —See Varchi, Storie Fiorentine.
