In 1922, Léon Bonnat bequeathed to the Louvre a wonderful album of almost forty drawings by one of the most famous painters of the Florentine Renaissance: Baccio della Porta, known as Fra Bartolomeo (1469-1517). The collection traces the career of the artist, who trained in Florence around 1485 with Cosimo Rosselli, but above all in the shadow of the most brilliant workshop of the period, that of Andrea del Verrocchio. Sensitive to the prodigious innovations coming out of this extraordinary environment, which had produced such geniuses as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Leonardo da Vinci in the previous decade, Baccio, as he was then known, studied above all with Lorenzo di Credi, to whom Verrocchio had entrusted the running of the workshop when he left Florence for Venice. Baccio also closely followed all the great Florentine painters of the last decade of the fifteenth century, in particular the works of foreigners who had been in Florence for several years, especially Pietro Perugino, and those of Ghirlandaio's workshop, then at the height of their popularity. The two volumes accurately reproduce the almost forty drawings in the Louvre album accompanied by a commentary written by two museum specialists. Text in French. AUTHORS: Laura Angelucci is a researcher in the Graphic Arts Department of the Musée du Louvre and regularly contributes to the department's exhibitions and publications. Louis Frank is general heritage conservator, curator at the Musée du Louvre, Department of Graphic Arts, with a focus on the Italian Renaissance. SELLING POINTS: . Fra Bartolomeo, a painter of great sensitivity, took up the lesson of the most important artists of the Florentine Renaissance, from Ghirlandaio to Leonardo da Vinci, influencing the young Raphael . The album, an admirable tool for better understanding the artist's creative processes and reproduced here for the first time, traces his career through preparatory proofs, including an extraordinary group of landscapes, drawn en plein air . ?The curators are both experts on Italian Renaissance painting, working at the Musée du Louvre and the Ecole du Louvre 90 colour illustrations
