Minerva

Fra Bartolomeo's Minerva, painted around 1490 and now in the Louvre, Paris, depicts the Roman goddess of wisdom and war. This classical subject dates to the period before Fra Bartolomeo's religious conversion under Savonarola's influence, which led him to destroy many of his secular works and enter the Dominican order. The survival of this mythological painting is thus somewhat unusual given the artist's later radical rejection of profane imagery.

Fra Bartolomeo renders the classical goddess with the balanced compositional sense and refined modeling that would later characterize his religious paintings, demonstrating early mastery of the monumental figure style he would bring to his mature devotional work.