Baccio della Porta, called Fra Bartolommeo

Bequeathed by the artist to his pupil Paolino del Signoraccio, called Fra Paolino (1490-1547), Convent of San Marco, Florence,

inherited from him in 1547 by Suor Plautilla Nelli, Convent of Santa Caterina da Siena, Florence (1523-1588);

purchased in the later 1720s by Cavaliere Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, Florence (1675-1742), and mounted into an album with other land­scape drawings by Fra Bartolommeo (this drawing retains its original Gabburri mount);

purchased around 1758 from Gabburri's heirs by an English art dealer, William Kent (active 1742-1762), who presumably sold the album at Langford’s, London, 8 and 11 December 1762;

English private collects ion, by 1768;

the album purchased in 1925 in Southern Ireland by an anonymous collects or, then broken up and the drawings sold individually,

sale, London, Replica Shoes 's, 20 November 1957, lot 33 (catalogue by Carmen Gronau);

with P. & D. Colnaghi and Co. Ltd., London;

Richard Zinser, New York;

David Rust, Washington, 1967,

sale, London, Christie's, 12 April 1983, lot 25;

Michael Currier (1961-1998), New York;

with Richard Day, London and New York, at the offices of E.J. Landrigan Inc., An Exhibition of Old Master Drawings, 1988, no. 8 (reproduced);

with Thomas Williams Replica Handbags Ltd., Old Master Drawings, London, 1999 no. 3 (reproduced),

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 2 (entry by Andrew Robison);

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private collects ion, 2012-2013, no. 2

W. R. Jeudwine, 'Fine Works on the Market: a Volume of Landscape Drawings by Fra Bartolommeo', Apollo, vol. 66, 1957, p. 135;

C. Gronau, 'Preface', Catalogue of Drawings of Landscapes and Trees by Fra Bartolommeo, The Property of a Gentleman, Replica Shoes & Co, 1957, pp. II-V;

This rare and highly important view, drawn from life by the Florentine Renaissance master Fra Bartolommeo, is one of extremely few pure landscape drawings in western art of the period around 1500. A quintessential Tuscan scene, this monumental representation of nature and buildings bathed in soft, broad light, is most probably a view of the city of Lucca or its surroundings, with a Romanesque campanile seen upper center, and lower right a double entrance gate, the first gate surmounted by a prominent bell.

The sheet originates from an album containing forty-one landscape drawings by the artist, which include studies of borghi (small cities), convents and hermitages, rocky hills and wooded areas with farm buildings, and also some sketches of trees, seen simply in isolation. These vibrant images are personal and spontaneous ‘mementi’, sketched during Fra Bartolommeo’s travels in the early part of his career. Worth remembering is the fact that he was the son of a muleteer and would have known and observed these very locations from a young age, a familiarity that must have nourished the sensibility and observational acumen that is so evident in these uniquely intimate views. This album, assembled by the Florentine aristocrat Cavaliere Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri (see Provenance), was dispersed at auction in 1957, and the great majority of the drawings are now in museum collects ions; in the last quarter century, only three sheets from the album have been sold at auction, two of them tree studies, and more recently a view of Fiesole, the only other drawing of an identifiable location from this group to have appeared at auction in a generation.¹

Before this extraordinary album appeared at auction in 1957 (see Provenance), only about a dozen landscape drawings by Fra Bartolommeo were known. As Chris Fischer noted in the catalogue of the first exhibition devoted to the artist’s drawings, held in Rotterdam in 1990, the appearance of these landscapes contributed to a general re-evaluation of Fra Bartolommeo as a draftsman.² Landscapes form such an integral part of his paintings, adding a poetic touch that complements the grandeur of his compositions and the monumentality of his figures, and these drawings shed important light on this essential but little known aspect of his work. With the appearance of these landscape drawings, the balance of the artist’s oeuvre shifted, allowing it to be seen in a new, somehow more intimate, perspective, in which the focus of the artist's attention becomes the observation of nature and of rural life in the surroundings of Florence, resulting, as in the Nixon drawing, in an idyllic and captivating representation of the landscape – in this case interspersed with handsome historic buildings.

The majority of these landscapes seem to be precise renderings of specific sites and often depict views of Dominican holdings in the vicinity of Florence, places where ‘the Frate’ spent t.mes . As Chris Fischer has recently pointed out, Fra Bartolommeo had a special attachment to the city and surroundings of Lucca, home of his mentor and protector Fra Sante Pagnini (1470-1541), a leading Biblical scholar of his day, whose Dominican convent of San Romano, in that city, was one of the strongholds of the Dominicans reformed by Savonarola.³ The landscape drawings by Fra Bartolommeo, dated by Chris Fischer to around 1500, constitute a coherent and harmonious group.⁴ Though most likely drawn largely for pleasure, three of them can none the less be related to his paintings, and it seems plausible that he would have preserved them for further inspiration and made use of them occasionally for his painted works.⁵ The refined and elegant way in which these landscapes are drawn, mostly, as here, in pen and ink, is remarkable. The pairing of spontaneity with totally controlled execution is also striking; the drawings capture not only a living image, but also the eternity of a moment. As Chris Fischer put it: ‘the subject of these drawings is the humanized landscape, the description of an ambiance created by the collaboration of man and nature’.⁶

Drawing delicately from life, solely in pen and ink, Fra Bartolommeo has here first quickly sketched the foreground, leaving blank spaces, and giving us a clear impression of where he is sitting while sketching, at some distance from the city, looking up and to his right towards the gates. With enormous skill and impressive rapidity of lines, he describes first the empty foreground planes. At the center right of the sheet, we are encouraged to follow the master and enter the city via the two monumental gates flanked by a variety of lush trees. Further back, at the top of the hill, the silhouettes of important buildings catch our attention. The view is surmounted by the Romanesque campanile and the unusual square crossing tower of a building to its right. The tranquil, sloping hillside, void of human figures, contributes poetically to a sensation of spiritual harmony and peace, while the rounded and elongated trees, quickly drawn, are interspersed here and there between the buildings. Although the artist has limited himself to linear media, employing no tonal washes, this landscape, like others, is essentially constructed with light; with the utmost economy of lines, this brilliant draftsman has been totally successful in defining the different planes, and the recession within the scene. This sensitive representation of nature and buildings is among the earliest pure landscape studies known, forming part of what is, as Chris Fischer noted, ‘the largest group of drawn landscape views by any Italian Renaissance artist, comparable, for their date, only to the drawings and watercolours of Albrecht Dürer.’⁷

The album of landscape drawings by Fra Bartolommeo from which this sheet originates was assembled by Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri (1676-1742),⁸ a distinguished collects or-connoisseur and writer, who had also gathered some 500 other drawings by the artist into the two hugely important volumes, now in the collects ion of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, in Rotterdam. The forty-one landscape drawings were mounted separately a few years later, and in a volume less luxurious than the previous two. Interestingly, even though Gabburri must have acquired the landscapes from the same source as the rest of his Fra Bartolommeo drawings, he thought that they were by Andrea del Sarto, so already by the first half of the eighteenth century, awareness of Fra Bartolommeo as a landscape draughtsman had clearly been lost. The title page of the album is signed and dated Rinaldo Botti 1730, and decorated with a classical ruin, inscribed ‘RACCOLTA DI PAESI E VEDUTE DAL VERO. ORIGINALI DI ANDREA DEL SARTO’. This page is today preserved at the Fondation Custodia, in Paris, together with the frontispiece to the album, also drawn by Rinaldo Botti (1658-1740), which bears Gabburri’s coat of arms.⁹ As Fischer pointed out, Gabburri might have been led to this conclusion because of the seventeenth-century inscription on one of the sheets, which reads: di mano dell Frate/Anzi di Andrea (‘by the hand of the Frate, or rather by Andrea’).¹⁰ This uncertainty regarding the attribution of the landscape drawings could suggest they were acquired by Gabburri unattributed, despite the fact that they share the same provenance as the other group of 505 drawings by the ‘Frate’, and would have been part of the same purchase from the Convent of Santa Caterina da Siena, located only a few streets away from where Gabburri lived, in the Palazzo Giuntini, in Via Ghibbellina, Florence.

The negotiation with the nuns of Santa Caterina da Siena may have begun around 1722,¹¹ but the purchase of the drawings by Fra Bartolommeo must have been concluded somewhat after that date; when Gabburri compiled a catalogue of his collects ion,¹² no drawings by either the ‘Frate’ or Andrea del Sarto were listed, and only in a letter to Gabburri dated 29 December 1725 do we find them first.mes ntioned, by the Venetian collects or, print maker, and art dealer, Antonio Maria Zanetti (1679-1767), who congratulates the collects or for the beautiful acquisition of the drawings by Fra Bartolommeo.¹³ Further confirmation is provided by the inclusion of a sheet by Fra Bartolommeo in the exhibition of sixteenth-century drawings from Gabburri’s collects ion, held by the ‘Accademici del Disegno’ in the cloister of the Santissima Annunziata, which opened on 18 October 1729, the feast of St. Luke.¹⁴ After Gabburri's death in 1742, all three albums were acquired from his heirs in around 1758-60, by the little-known British dealer William Kent, based in Florence and Rome, and brought to England. These were then sold in London in around 1760-61, and remained in Britain.¹⁵ In 1768, Robert Surtees, an amateur artist from County Durham, drew copies of some of the landscapes from the album, then in an unspecified English collects ion.¹⁶ Prior to the sale in 1957, the album with the landscape drawings belonged to an unidentified Irish collects or, who had bought it around 1925.¹⁷

In contrast to the spontaneity and delight of Fra Bartolommeo’s landscape drawings, the bulk of the artist’s graphic oeuvre consists of figure studies, the majority preparatory for his painted works, illustrating his well-organized working method, and permitting us to follow the dynamics of his creative process towards the final composition. These generally display a rational and conventional mind, and his corpus of drawings contains no rapid sketches of poses or gestures, done from life. Instead, he seems mostly to have used manikins and sculptural models, which allowed him to achieve a strong three-dimensional effect, well suited to the monumentality of his frescoes and altarpieces.

A drawing such as the Nixon landscape is not only one of very few depictions of real views preserved from the Italian Renaissance but also brings us much closer to the inner thoughts and emotions of this highly reflective and spiritual artist. It captures the essence of a real place, while at the same t.mes conveying its poetic core, through the contemplation of the harmonious congruence between human and nature. This is a fitting reflection of the intense spirituality of the Frate’s oeuvre, and his search for a perfection expressed with simplicity, achieved, as here, through the linearity and claritys of his pen-work.

Such a credo is also in keeping with the teachings of Savonarola, so important an influence in Fra Bartolommeo’s spiritual life, who stressed simplicity as a crucial objective in Christian life. As Fischer has rightly observed, the landscape drawings 'furnish us a glimpse of the non-official aspect of Fra Bartolommeo's artistic creativity, when he worked, not out a sense of duty, but out of love.'¹⁸

Clearly, these drawings by Fra Bartolommeo were known and absorbed by his followers and contemporaries, and indeed, evidence of their influence can even be found in Raphael’s Disputa, where the landscape in the background of this famous and celebrated fresco can be related to a drawing by Fra Bartolommeo, the Farmhouse on a Slope of a Hill, once part of the same Gabburri album and now in the Cleveland Museum of Art,¹⁹ demonstrating how consciously Raphael drew inspiration from the Dominican artist, with whom he shared the same poetic and harmonious approach to the representation and significance of nature.

1. Sold: New York, Christie’s, 24 January 2001, lot 7; London, Christie’s, 7 July 2010, lot 308; and New York, Replica Shoes ’s, Drawings from the collects ion of Howard and Saretta Barnet, 31 January 2018, lot 5

2. C. Fischer, Fra Bartolommeo. Master Draughtsman of the High Renaissance: A Selection from the Rotterdam Albums and Landscape Drawings from Various collects ions, exh. cat., Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen and elsewhere,1990-92, p. 375

3. E-mail dated 22 October 2025; we are extremely grateful to Chris Fischer for sharing with us his cataloguing of the present sheet, for his forthcoming publication on the drawings of Fra Bartolommeo

4. See note 3

5. For example The sweep of a river with fishermen and a town in the background, London, Courtauld Institute, inv. D.1978. PG. 88; see, C. Fischer in Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery, exh. cat., London, Courtauld Gallery and New York, The Frick collects ion, 2012, pp. 68-70, no. 9, reproduced; for information on the other connected sheets, see Fischer, op. cit., 1990-92, p. 377

6. Fischer, op. cit., 1990-92, p. 375

7. Fischer, in exh. cat., op. cit., under note 5 above, p. 68 under no. 9; see also Fischer, “Fra Bartolommeo’s Landscape Drawings”, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 32, 1989, pp. 301-342

8. Fischer, op. cit., 1990-92, p. 375

9. Paris, Fondation Custodia, inv. nos. 1986-T.8, 1986-T.9

10. Fischer, op. cit., 1990-92, p. 375; sale, London, Replica Shoes ’s, Catalogue of Drawings of Landscapes and Trees by Fra Bartolommeo, 20 November 1957, lot 25 (reproduced)

11. A.J. Elen, ‘Out of Oblivion. An Extraordinary Provenance’, in Fra Bartolommeo. The Divine Renaissance, exh. cat., Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2016-17, p. 46

12. Two inventories listing sections of his collects ion of works on paper, one posthumous, are preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence; see N. Turner, ‘The Gabburri/Rogers series of drawn self-portraits and portraits of artist’, Journal of the History of collects ions, vol. 5, no. 2, 1993, p. 180, and note 10

13. Curiously, though, the title pages of the Rotterdam albums record the date of acquisition as 1727

14. Fischer, op. cit., 1990-92, p. 14

15. J. Ingamells, compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy. 1701-1800, New Haven and London 1997, pp. 571-2

16. See sale catalogue, London, Christie’s, 18 March 1980, lot 6

17. Fischer, op. cit., 1990-92, p. 15, and p.31 note 3316.

18. Idem, “Fra Bartolommeo’s Landscape Drawings”, op. cit., 1989, p. 334

19. Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. n. 1957.498; see Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, exhib.cat., op. cit., 2016-17, p. 216, no. 6.10, reproduced and p. 121; see Fischer, op.cit., 1989, p. 325