world of vanity.8 Before discussing Bartolommeo's works and style in depth, one must first give a general sense of his styles and why he adopted them and evolved the way he did. For the most part this general introduction to Bartolommeo's style has been provided in the previous pages.Fra Bartolommeo always had a sense for the grandiose and largescale figures and settings.To the untrained eye or even at first glance of a work by Bartolommeo, one might be inclined to see virtuosic curvilinearities and dark theatricality, almost foreshadowing the Baroque and Giovanni Bernini. However dark and shadowy and emotional, Bartolommeo's works were quite restrained and simplistic, ignoring vain detail which was an important aspect of the lavish and ornate Baroque style, reassuring Fra Bartolommeo's role as a High Renaissance painter. Heinrich Wolfflin describes Bartolommeo's figures as "unshakably firm" and "grasp...with an iron grip" on page 141 of Classic Art. Bartolommeo hardly cared for detail, and noticably in the majority of his large chalk drawings, which studied the human figure he barely paid attention to the individualism of the face. Instead he concentrated on creating a sincerity that would shine through to the viewer, abolishing all attention to frivolous detail. His chalk drawings are perfect examples of this because of their single largescale figure, with a composition concentrating solely on the emotion being evoked and expressed. Perhaps a more noteworthy or recognizable painting to illustrate this evoking of emotion would be Fra Bartolommeo's The Last Judgement from 1499, as pictured in Figure 1. This shared work by Fra Bartolommeo was completed for the Santa Maria Nuova, but later was moved to the Uffizi where it remains still today. Critques of this fresco point out a lack of cohesion which causes possible boredom or disinterest for the reader.9 An old-fashioned style of portraying a crowd of people at the bottom ...
