Ghirlandaio's
Biography...
Ghirlandaio
(also spelled Ghirlandaio, original name Domenico
di Tommaso Bigordi) was an early Renaissance
painter of the Florentine school noted for his
detailed narrative frescoes, which include many
portraits of leading citizens in contemporary
dress.
Domenico
was the son of a goldsmith, and his nickname
"Ghirlandaio" was derived from his
father's skill in making garlands. Domenico
probably began as an apprentice in his father's
shop, but almost nothing is known about his
training as a painter or the beginnings of his
career. The earliest works attributed to him,
dating from the early 1470s, show strong
influence from the frescoes of Andrea del
Castagno, who died when Ghirlandaio was about
eight years old. Giorgio Vasari, the biographer
of Renaissance artists, recorded in his Lives
(1550) that Ghirlandaio was a pupil of the
Florentine painter Alesso Baldovinetti, but
Baldovinetti was only four or five years older
than Ghirlandaio himself. He worked in fresco on
large wall surfaces in preference to smaller
scale paintings executed on wood panels, although
he used them for the altarpieces that were the
centrepieces of the fresco cycles in his major
undertakings. He never experimented with oil
painting, although most Florentine painters of
his generation began to use it exclusively in the
last quarter of the 15th century.
The
village church of Cercina, near Florence, has a
fresco of three saints, now thought to be
Ghirlandaio's earliest work, but there is general
agreement that some frescoes in the church of
Ognissanti in Florence, almost certainly dating
from around 1472-73, show his style at its
earliest developed stage. One of them represents
the Pietà and depicts several members of the
Vespucci family as mourners, thus already
introducing Ghirlandaio's characteristic
combination of portrait figures in contemporary
dress with a specifically religious subject.
Something of the passion for minute detail shown
by the early Flemish painters can be found in
Ghirlandaio's work at this period; his fresco
"St. Jerome in His Study," also in
Ognissanti and dated 1480, may even be an
enlarged version in fresco of an oil painting by
the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, which had found
its way to Florence. The St. Jerome fresco is
particularly important because it is a companion
piece to one of St Augustine by Ghirlandaio's
Florentine contemporary Sandro Botticelli; the
difference between the two frescoes reveals
Ghirlandaio's rather pedestrian and anecdotal
style.
Ghirlandaio's
first major commissioned works were the two
frescoes depicting scenes from the life of St
Fina, painted in 1475 in the Chapel of Santa Fina
in the Collegiata at San Gimignano, near
Florence. Both works derive from Fra Filippo
Lippi's slightly earlier fresco cycle in the
cathedral at Prato and contain a number of
portrait heads arranged, rather stiffly, in the
symmetrical type of composition that was to
become increasingly identified with Ghirlandaio.
Even then he was already employing assistants; in
his later works he clearly could only complete
large commissions in the comparatively short time
allotted by the extensive use of highly trained
assistants working simultaneously on different
parts of the frescoes.
In 1481-82
Ghirlandaio received an important commission in
the Vatican for a fresco, nominally representing
the calling of the first Apostles, Peter and
Andrew, in the Sistine Chapel. Its style is
reminiscent of the frescoes by Masaccio of about
1427, which had been the great innovating works
of the early 15th century in Florence but by then
must have seemed somewhat old-fashioned. The
principal feature of this fresco is the group of
portraits of the Florentine colony in Rome, who
are represented as witnesses of the biblical
event. It has been suggested that the inclusion
of these Florentines in a fresco painted for the
Vatican had political significance, because the
Florentine government had recently accused Pope
Sixtus IV of complicity in the conspiracy of the
Pazzi, another powerful Tuscan banking family, to
murder the leading members of the Florentine
Medici family.
Ghirlandaio
must have used his stay in Rome to study Roman
antiquities at first hand, for many details of
triumphal arches, ancient sarcophagi, and similar
antique elements occur in his works throughout
the rest of his career. A sketchbook filled with
drawings of such antiquities (now in El Escorial,
near Madrid) seems to be the work of a member of
his shop.
Late in
his short life, Ghirlandaio and his assistants,
including his brothers Davide and Benedetto and
his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi, produced
two major fresco cycles. The earlier, a series of
frescoes and an altarpiece painted in tempera,
was executed for the Sassetti Chapel in Santa
Trinità in Florence. Commissioned by Francesco
Sassetti, an agent of the Medici bank, they were
painted between about 1482 and 1485. The six main
frescoes represent scenes from the life of St.
Francis of Assisi, Sassetti's patron saint. Once
more, the frescoes contain many details of the
buildings and customs of the period - for
example, the original front of the church of
Santa Trinità itself - and, in particular, there
are numerous portraits of members of the Sassetti
family shown together with some of the leading
members of the Medici family, what may appear to
have been a closer intimacy than was actually the
case. The altarpiece, dated 1485, contains
further evidence of Ghirlandaio's interest in
classical antiquity, for it shows the Adoration
of the Shepherds with a Roman triumphal arch in
the background and a Roman sarcophagus in place
of the traditional manger. This painting in
tempera has several direct references to
contemporary Flemish paintings, especially the
enormous altarpiece painted in oil by Hugo van
der Goes, which had been commissioned in Flanders
by Tommaso Portinari, another agent of the Medici
bank, and which arrived in Florence in the late
1470s.
Ghirlandaio's
last and greatest fresco cycle was painted for
another Medici banker, Giovanni Tornabuoni, and
represents scenes from the life of the Virgin and
of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of
Florence. Ghirlandaio signed the contract on
Sept. 1, 1485, for these large frescoes on the
walls of the choir of Santa Maria Novella in
Florence. The altarpiece was still incomplete
when he died, but his assistants, among whom was
probably the boy Michelangelo, had completed the
frescoes by about 1490. The front panel of the
altarpiece (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) was
completed by assistants according to
Ghirlandaio's design soon after his death in
1494. Even more than in the Sassetti Chapel these
narrative scenes contain a wealth of detail
showing patrician interiors and contemporary
dress; as a result they are one of the most
important sources for current knowledge of the
furnishings of a late 15th-century Florentine
palace.
The
frescoes in Santa Maria Novella are overcrowded
with detail, so that the compositions fail to
make their full impact. Some of Ghirlandaio's
smaller panel paintings, particularly the
portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni (1488), have a
simplicity that makes them far more striking than
the frescoes of Santa Maria Novella. The portrait
representing an old man with a strawberry nose
with his grandchild (c. 1480-90; Louvre, Paris)
is perhaps Ghirlandaio's finest painting, notable
for its tenderness and humanity, as well as a
simplicity and directness of handling.
Ghirlandaio
never received a major commission from the Medici
family or from any other leading patrons. In the
late 19th century, however, because of the high
degree of realism in his work, he was ranked as a
leading Florentine painter of the 15th century.
Although during much of the 20th century the
greater imaginative power of Botticelli or
Filippino Lippi made Ghirlandaio's paintings seem
dull, since the 1960s the honesty and truth of
his works have brought him back into critical
favour.
Ghirlandaio's
son, Ridolfo, was also a noted painter. Among his
best-known works are a pair representing scenes
from the life of St Zenobius (1517; Academy
Gallery, Florence).
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