In 1508, Raphael left Florence for Rome, and Fra Bartolommeo obtained leave to go to Venice, where, in company with the piagnone sculptor, Baccio da Montelupo, he visited the churches and palaces on the lagoons, and saw the Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini and the frescoes of Titian and Giorgione in the glory of their first freshness. At the prayer of the Dominicans of S. Pietro Martire at Murano, he agreed to paint an altar-piece for their church, and received twenty-five florins in advance, together with three more to buy colours, hoping to raise the rest of the money by the sale of some letters of St Katherine of Siena in their possession. Immediately after his return to Florence the painter set to work on this picture—the noble Vision of God the Father adored by St. Katherine of Siena and the Magdalen, now in the Lucca Gallery. But the friars of Murano were unable to raise the remainder of the 100 florins which they had promised the painter, and, at the end of three years, Fra Bartolommeo gave the work to his friend Prior Pagnini, who presented it to the church of San Romano in his native city of Lucca. In the same year, 1509, the master painted another fine altar-piece of the Virgin enthroned between St. John the Baptist and a youthful St. Stephen, with the palm of victory in his hand and the stones of martyrdom on his head, which still adorns the Duomo of Lucca. Here the angels flying in the air and holding the crown over the Virgin's head are very similar to those introduced by Raphael in his unfinished Madonna del Baldacchino, while the lovely cherub playing the lute on the steps of the throne was evidently suggested by the child angels in Gian Bellini's Venetian altar-pieces Both pictures
