He was born in 1449, his father appropriately being a garland-maker for gay Florence. He was trained under Alesso Baldovinetti, but prudently declined to compromise his own bright coloring with the new technic of oil painting. He studied with profit the ornate narratives of Benozzo Gozzoli. One of his earliest frescoes, painted about 1470 in Ognissanti, already reveals the grounds of his later popularity. The vivid portraits of the Vespucci family so crowd about a Madonna of Pity as to make her seem quite secondary.

Somewhat later he painted the legend of Santa Fina at San Gimignano. Here Gozzoli’s simpler vein is imitated, and the effect has a rusticity befitting the theme. Soon the bottega at Florence flourished mightily. There were two younger brothers to help, and all commissions were executed with businesslike dispatch. About 1480 we find him once more painting for the Church of Ognissanti. His St. Jerome there, Figure 121, is a beautifully groomed old prelate in a wonderfully kept study. The Saint is caught in an interval of work, searching perhaps for the right Latin word to render the Hebrew text before him. He is grave and not too stern. The colors are vivid without much regard for harmony. Very little of the fire of the missionary who declined to subject the mysteries of God to the rules of the grammarian Donatus is suggested. One has only to look at Botticelli’s St. Augustine, opposite in the church, agonized by the burden of thought, to realize that Ghirlandaio has cared nothing for the psychology of his theme, but has given us any comfortable old Florentine scholar placidly occupied in his scriptorium.

A similar lack of emotional content mars the otherwise delightful Last Supper, Figure 122, which was painted that same year for the refectory of Ognissanti. Pathos, not to say tragedy, is carefully kept out of the most solemn of scenes. The eye is likely to go first to the tree-tops and flying birds seen above the screen, then it becomes vaguely aware of a gentle company quietly feasting. Except for a faint trace of classicism in the costumes, it could be any governing board of any religious confraternity of the day, decorously enjoying its annual dinner. The qualities and defects of Ghirlandaio are fully apparent in this fresco—his lucidity and sweetness, his emotional nullity.

The next year, 1481, Ghirlandaio painted in the Sistine Chapel at Rome Christ Calling Peter and Andrew. We have already considered this his nearest approach to monumental design. Shortly before the Roman trip he married, and when his wife Costanza died, after a decent interval, he repeated the adventure. The two wedlocks were blessed by nine children of whom one, Ridolfo, was to become in turn a notable painter. Such fecundity was worthy of the man who once sighed for a commission to fresco the seven-mile circuit of the walls of Florence. On his return from Rome Ghirlandaio decorated the great hall of the Palace of the Priors, and from now on merely a list of his commissions and patrons would be a blue book of the old aristocracy and new wealth of Florence.

Thus in 1485 he contracted with Francesco Sassetti to do a chapel in the Trinità with Stories of St. Francis. Sassetti was confidential treasurer for Lorenzo the Magnificent, about the most important financial position in the world at the moment; a selfmade and ambitious man. He had tried in vain to get a finer chapel in a bigger church, but the patrician vested interests prevented. Still the chapel to the right of the Choir of the Trinità was no mean place, this Vallombrosan foundation being one of the oldest in Florence. Ghirlandaio took special pains with the frescoes, studying with intelligence Giotto’s famous versions of the stories at Santa Croce. He is most nearly monumental where he follows Giotto, as in the Death of St. Francis, but he also shows surprising felicities of his own. The scene where Pope Honorius III constitutes St. Francis and his fellows a monastic order, is remarkable for not only fine incidental portraiture, but for a nobility of space composition faintly anticipating Raphael. One scarcely realizes the subject as such. All the dramatic features with which Giotto emphasized the eagerness of the saint, the humility of his companions, the professional dignity of the Pope and the half-veiled hostility of the papal court are absent. One’s eyes go over the group to the familiar grandiose prospect of the Piazza della Signoria at Florence, and one feels that never till now has he rightly apprehended its amplitude and splendor. Then there are sharp pleasant surprises. At the left is the ugly and fascinating figure of Lorenzo de’ Medici and behind him the gross apparition of Francesco Sassetti himself. And in front there are people coming up from a lower level, only their heads and shoulders emerging. The swarthy man who leads is Angelo Poliziano, greatest of humanistic poets, tutor of Lorenzo’s sons. And the boys are these gifted children destined to be popes, and granddukes. The combination of great spaciousness and centrality with casual unexpected graces is so piquant and original, that I suppose Ghirlandaio may have hit upon it almost accidentally, owing to the inevitable relations of his Gothic lunette to the architectural forms in the fresco. In any case Ghirlandaio never again did anything as impressive. It is his greatest hymn of praise to the Florence that he so dearly loved.

In the same chapel is a remarkable picture representing the Piazza of the Trinità with St. Francis resuscitating a boy of the Spini family, Figure 123. It has extraordinary bits of invention, but lacks the organization of the fresco just discussed. The altar-piece for the chapel, an Adoration of the Shepherds, now in the Uffizi, represents the graciousness of Ghirlandaio in familiar narrative his willing acceptance of the panoramic richness of the age, and his exceptional power of portraiture in these rustics painted from himself and from members of the Sassetti family. The ruggedness of the characterization suggests Flemish painting. Ghirlandaio may well have been influenced by the great Nativity with Portraits which Hugo van der Goes sent down from Ghent, in 1476, to the Hospital Church of Santa Maria Nuova.

Ghirlandaio’s altar-pieces are many. They are brilliant without real harmony of color; pretty, without much insight, in the types of the Virgin and youthful saints. The most elaborate of these panels, An Adoration of the Magi, Figure 124, was finished in 1488 for the Foundling Hospital dedicated to the Massacred Innocents of Bethlehem. It still stands on its original altar in the chapel of the Innocenti, and is a radiant thing. The crowded group of adorers in the foreground is well knit together. Ghirlandaio had taken a shrewd look at Botticelli’s Epiphany (now at Petrograd), or at Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece. By a touching and appropriate invention, Ghirlandaio has set two of the martyred Innocents kneeling in white robes and crowned with a saint’s nimbus among the Wise Men. There are, as usual, many portraits, including Ghirlandaio’s own, by the pillar at the right. The deep river valley, suggested by northern paintings or engravings, relieves the somewhat congested character of the figure arrangement. The girlish Madonna would do no discredit to the front cover of a nation-wide periodical today. So gracious and ingenious is this picture that one regrets to note that it is rather cleverly staged than deeply felt, its manifold prettiness and picturesqueness, of a quite obvious character.

As Ghirlandaio had moved from success to success, so he was destined to end in his day of highest glory. In 1485 he signed a contract with Giovanni Tornabuoni, of the old nobility, to decorate the choir of the most aristocratic church in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. The subjects, the Life of the Virgin and St. John the Baptist, were already on the wall in the guise of water-soaked and ruined frescoes by Andrea Orcagna. Ghirlandaio provided pastoral scenes with wide landscapes, city prospects with charming girls plentiful in foreground, rich patrician interiors with graceful women and their attendants making visits of ceremony, rare religious events with heavy magistrates and dignitaries standing inattentively by—everything in short that a prosperous and well-bred Florentine of the moment was accustomed to think desirable in beauty, gentleness, or worldly estate. Characteristic are the Salutation of Mary and Elizabeth, a picture in which the solemnity of the scene, so magnificently asserted by Giotto at Padua, slips away into mere spectacle and civility; the Birth of Saint John, Figure 125, with a young girl of the Tornabuoni family making her visit with her maids, and all manner of graceful and rich accessories; or again, the Presentation in The Temple, with a whole tribe of Tornabuonis and Ghirlandaios in negligent attendance on the sacred rite. These may stand for the whole. For their casual and mundane richness John Ruskin has poured upon these frescoes his double-distilled vials of wrath. What he says as to their superficiality and emptiness of religious feeling is true enough, yet his denunciatory rhetoric serves but as a trip-hammer to demolish an eggshell which has after all its iridescent frail beauty. Gentler methods are better with so gently mundane a creature as Ghirlandaio. The Lord’s people, as he saw them about him, were good enough for him and for his art. Criticism should rather insist that, being worldly, he was not worldly enough to be strong and lucid, but too readily had recourse to promiscuous richness and perfunctory ideals of prettiness. Still, it does not befit the age or race whose characteristic art product is the smiling or pensive girl on the cover of the popular magazine to throw the first stone at Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Whatever the verdict as to his nominally religious painting, in portraiture Ghirlandaio is one of the greatest figures of his time. Portraits of the finest qualities abound in his frescoes, and he has left a few incomparable things on panel. Few Renaissance portraits have the authority of the amazing old man, Figure 126, in the Louvre, who fondles an adoring boy. In this picture, deformity becomes a grace, and the spiritual and material interpretation are of equal incisiveness and beauty. As fine in another vein is the profile of Giovanna degli Albizzi in the J. P. Morgan Collection, Figure 101. It is dated in 1488. It is the supreme portrait of a Florentine beauty of a passing and lovely moment. An instant of time, when the old simplicity had enriched itself with new learning; when with the new humanism the tournament and court of love persisted; when courtly manners had become an ideal without freezing into an official code—all this is for a sensitive and informed observer in this placid well-poised head of an ill-starred Florentine bride. She died in 1488, a little before the overthrow of the Florence she typifies. Her accomplished young husband, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, equally adequate in the tilt yard, the study, or the council hall, lived on for nine years and shared the death agony of the society of which he was a chief ornament. When his head fell under Savonarola’s orders, a splendid chapter of early Florentine humanism closed. Thus these young people died with their Florence, leaving no descendants, but a memory eternally fragrant.

The year of Giovanna’s death, 1488, Ghirlandaio, being thirty-nine years old, took a new wife, and continued diligently at the frescoes of Santa Maria Novella. Not being overburdened with imagination, he probably never guessed he was occupied with a memorial of a society already doomed. Doubtless he followed the fashionable throng to San Marco where for a year Fra Girolamo Savonarola had been preaching against the current vanities. Ghirlandaio presumably approved the oratory, with a comfortable sense that while unworldliness might very properly be preached, no sensible city could ever be induced to practice it. Perhaps he never woke up to the appalling fact that Savonarola literally meant business both evangelically and politically.

So Ghirlandaio’s Florence moved swiftly to its doom, and the while he saved much of its look and grace on the walls of his choir. For a year a touchy and ugly little boy who carried the disproportionately great name of Michelangelo Buonarotti scrambled discontentedly about the scaffolding of the choir, lending a hand here and there, and learning the old art of fresco painting. Ghirlandaio of course never knew that in the restless apprentice he was training a titan. He probably thought him a nuisance. By the end of 1493 the frescoes of the Virgin and St. John the patron of Florence were nearly finished, and the altar-piece, an Assumption, was already planned. At forty-four Ghirlandaio had at once reached his climax and painted himself down an anachronism. Of course he didn’t know it; such self-knowledge is mercifully spared us. The luck of Ghirlandaio was extraordinarily constant. Nowhere is it more signally shown than in the date of his death. Some inkling that things were going ill under Piero de’ Medici’s fitful rule must have come to him, but he died in January 1494, a good ten months before the Medici were expelled, their palaces sacked, and Savonarola in charge of a Florence terrified into sobriety.

To those painters from Fra Filippo to Ghirlandaio who caught the look and unpretentious poetry of Medicean Florence we owe an especial gratitude. They are not in the direct line of progress and they none of them reached the heights of art. But for centuries they have never failed to give delightful information, while infallibly touching average human sympathies. We do ill to idolize them, for they were after all rather small men, but we do well also to honor them according to their accomplishment. They did their particular task of enlivening decoration with illustrative episodes, with tact, refinement and knowledge; with all the sympathy of the modestly observant eye. Most of their work had to be undone before the Grand Style was possible, but it all evinces the vitality and variety without which as preliminary training the Grand Style itself could hardly have attained its elaborate and strictly ordered composure. We do well to take Vasari’s general view of these artists of the human spectacle—not considering them so much as weak links in a mighty chain, but as complete in themselves, as a youth may be complete even though the young man dies in the glory of his unfolding. Why expect prematurely the sedate splendors of middle age? Take then this art for what it offers—an unsystematic fairy land which is yet half real, and keep your higher standards in reserve for artists who better deserve them. For austere standards are held by a truly civilized person for purposes of discriminate praise and not as a ready means of promiscuous blame.

Pageantry in Old Florence

The art of Gozzoli and the cassone painters, and, in part, that of Filippo Lippi and Ghirlandaio implies the background of public pageantry at Florence. There is a precious piece of old doggerel which describes the festivities, in May 1459, for the reception of Pope Pius II and Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan. The palaces and churches were completely hung with rich stuffs, the sumptuary laws were suspended in favor of the fair sex; besides many processions and feasts, there was bear baiting in the Piazza della Signoria, an all night open-air ball in the Mercato Nuovo, and a tournament in the Piazza di Santa Croce. I paraphrase the verses which describe the pageant of a Triumph of Love which was conducted by ten year old Lorenzo de’ Medici. The subject is common in cassoni and deschi da parto. The boy Lorenzo mounted on a marvellously caparisoned horse headed the pageant, and while all the people whispered their admiration—

“As prudent and wise lad he conducted the Triumph of the God of Love.... In all triumph he made Cupid come, who so gently smites the gentle heart. Upon a car I saw him, and so I tell, most marvellously adorned and wrought, how it was made I dare not say. On four wheels it was finely adorned with a raised stand and fixed on every corner thereof as a column the form and fashion of an angel. And I who saw it thought of a castle. Upon the four columns was a great ball and above it another ornamented piece. This was gilded everywhere ... so that it sparkled like the sun. I cannot tell of such beauties, but I can tell about the top part which was most delightful. Above all ... I saw stand a youth, with two great wings of many colors on his shoulders and all the rest nude, holding that bow with which he wounds all hearts, and playfully puts venom therein, so that while burning within, nothing shows without. This Triumph so marvellous and so invested with colors, its adornment very glorious—with so many pearls, carbuncles and sapphires—I couldn’t reckon how many florins that Triumph was worth I say.”

The whole poem is a real treasure of such lore and should be translated. It is found in the new edition of Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Tom. XXVII. The quotation is from page 31, lines 1330–1363.

On St. John’s Day, 1354, Matteo Palmieri tells us in his Annals, there were many religious representations of which the most interesting to us, as a probable inspirer of Gozzoli’s frescoes, is that of the Three Kings from the East. There was—

“A magnificent and triumphant temple for the habitation [stage setting] of the Magi, in which was inclosed an octagonal temple adorned with the seven Virtues, and on the east side the Virgin with the New Born Christ. [Probably figures in a tableau vivant]

“The three Magi with a cavalcade of more than 200 horse adorned with many splendors came to make offerings to the New Born Christ.”

New ed. of Muratori, Tom. XXII, p. 173.

Probably all the artists mentioned in this chapter saw these two splendid pageants and many more. Such sights count for much in the alert and profusely ornamented painting of the fifteenth century.

Pageants in 1466

Piero de’ Medici “in order to give men something to think about which should take their thoughts from the state, and a year having passed since Cosimo had died, seized the occasion to enliven the city and ordered two elaborate celebrations, following the others that are customary in that city. One which represented, when the three Kings, the Magi, came from the East behind the star which showed the birth of Christ; the which was of such pomp and so magnificent, that in arranging and holding it the entire city was occupied for several months.”

Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, Lib. VII, cap. xii.

“The other [festival, Machiavelli continues] was a tournament (for so they used to call a spectacle, which represented a cavalry skirmish) where the first youths of the city exercised themselves against the most famous knights of Italy; and among the young men of Florence the most in repute was Lorenzo, first-born son of Piero, who not by favor, but by his own valor carried off the first honours.”

Lorenzo was then a likely lad of seventeen.

A Side-light on Ghirlandaio’s Patrons

The choir of Santa Maria Novella was under the patronage of the Ricci family, but they were poor and had been unable to repair the waterstained frescoes of Orcagna, which had been painted a century and a quarter earlier. So Giovanni Tornabuoni got permission to redecorate the chapel on condition of setting the Ricci arms “in the most conspicuous and honourable place in that chapel.” And so the contract was drawn. Domenico Ghirlandaio actually set the Tornabuoni arms in huge scale on the side pilasters, whereas he painted the Ricci arms half a foot high on the door of the ciborium in the centre of the base of his altar-piece. The rest in Vasari’s words (de Vere’s translation, Vol. III, p. 224):

“And a fine jest it was at the opening of the chapel, for these Ricci looked for their arms with much ado, and finally, not being able to find them, went off to the Tribunal of Eight, contract in hand. Whereupon the Tornabuoni showed that these arms had been placed in the most conspicuous and honourable part of the work; and although the others exclaimed that they were invisible, they were told that they were in the wrong, and that they must be content, since the Tornabuoni had caused them to be placed in so honourable a position as the neighborhood of the most Holy Sacrament. And so it was decided by that tribunal that they should be left untouched, as they may be seen today. Now, if this should appear to anyone to be outside the scope of the Life that I have to write, let him not be vexed, for it all flowed naturally from the tip of my pen. And it should serve, if for nothing else, at least to show how easily poverty falls a prey to riches, and how riches, if accompanied by discretion, achieve without censure anything that a man desires.”