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(b Florence, 1448-9; d Florence, Jan 1494). Painter, mosaicist and possibly goldsmith. He was head of one of the most active workshops in late 15th-century Florence. He developed a style of religious narrative that blended the contemporary with the historical in a way that updated the basic tenets of early Renaissance art. Domenico's documented material situation
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| Biography: Domenico Ghirlandaio |
The Italian artist Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) was the leading fresco painter in Florence in the late 15th century.
Domenico Ghirlandaio, born in Florence, was the son of the goldsmith Tommaso Bigordi. According to Giorgio Vasari, Tommaso was called Ghirlandaio (the garland maker) because he made metal garlands. Vasari also declared that Domenico studied painting with Alessio Baldovinetti. Twice married, Ghirlandaio had nine children, one of whom, Ridolfo (1483-1561), was also a painter. Ghirlandaio died of the plague in Florence on Jan. 11, 1494.
Ghirlandaio painted sweeping, well-filled but uncrowded compositions and easy portrait likenesses. He was interested in classical antiquity and aware of contemporary Flemish painting. He supervised a large shop of assistants, chief among whom were his brothers Davide and Benedetto and his brother-in-law, Bastiano Mainardi. The chief problem in Ghirlandaio scholarship is the sorting out of his work from that of his various associates.
Early Work
A recently uncovered fresco, the Madonna of Mercy and the Lamentation over Christ, in the Church of Ognissanti, Florence, is among Ghirlandaio's earliest (ca. 1475) extant works. The fresco, painted for the Vespucci family, displays Ghirlandaio's characteristic skill at portraiture and includes a portrait of Amerigo Vespucci.
In the frescoes (ca. 1475) in the Chapel of S. Fina in the Collegiata, San Gimignano, Ghirlandaio blended painted with real architecture to create open designs filled with portraits of the local citizens. One scene, the Funeral of St. Fina, includes a cityscape depicting the towers of San Gimignano.
In the Last Supper (1480) in the Church of Ognissanti refectory Ghirlandaio painted an extra bay into the scene, which appears to continue the real architecture of the refectory into the fresco. This device is remarkably effective, though it somewhat detracts from the story. The iconography is traditional, with Judas seated opposite Christ, but Ghirlandaio seems to anticipate Leonardo da Vinci in his arrangement of the disciples into groups of twos and threes.
Ghirlandaio's fresco, the Calling of Peter and Andrew, in the Sistine Chapel (1481-1482), Rome, is especially successful in its sense of openness and is one of the clearest and most easily read in the chapel. Characteristically, the "calling" is witnessed by crowds of onlookers and contains numerous contemporary portraits.
Sassetti Chapel
The Sassetti Chapel frescoes (1486) in Sta Trinita, Florence, are among Ghirlandaio's best work. The episodes, of the life of St. Francis, are embellished by contemporary Florentine settings and personalities. In the lunette scene depicting Francis receiving the rules of the order, the setting is the Piazza della Signoria with a view of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Among those witnessing the event are Lorenzo the Magnificent, Francesco Sassetti (the donor), and the writer Angelo Poliziano. The scene showing Francis resuscitating a child is set in the Piazza Sta Trinita with views of the bridge and Church of Sta Trinita.
S. Maria Novella
The most extensive fresco cycle Ghirlandaio executed, in the choir of the church of S. Maria Novella, Florence, was commissioned on Sept. 1, 1485, by Giovanni Tornabuoni. The artist promised to complete the project by May 1490. The frescoes tell the stories of St. John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary in 14 separate scenes arranged in four registers along the sidewalls of the choir. The style makes it clear that much of the actual painting was done by assistants. Recently restored, the frescoes are exceptionally effective decoration.
Panel Paintings
Ghirlandaio did a number of panel paintings. He preferred working in tempera, although he undoubtedly was familiar with the oil technique. In the Adoration of the Shepherds (1485) the swarthy peasant types seem to derive from Hugo van der Goes's Portinari Altarpiece. One of Ghirlandaio's most appealing panels is the Adoration of the Magi (1488). As in most of his work, the colors tend to be rather harsh and contrasty; nonetheless, the scene has a quiet piety and charm. It includes a particularly fine landscape viewed through the posts of the shed behind the Virgin and Child. Two portraits, Francesco Sassetti and His Son and the Grandfather with His Grandson, are noteworthy for their restrained gentleness. Ghirlandaio's last panel, the Visitation (1491), is rather simple in design and seems to anticipate the balanced compositions of the High Renaissance.
Further Reading
A full-length study of Ghirlandaio is Gerald S. Davies, Ghirlandaio (1908; 2d ed. 1909). A detailed study is in Raimond van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 13 (1931). See also Sydney Joseph Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (2 vols., 1961).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Domenico Ghirlandaio |
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| Domenico Ghirlandaio | |
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| Supposed self-portrait, from Adoration of the Magi, 1488 | |
| Birth name | Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi |
| Born | 11 January 1449 Florence, Italy |
| Died | 11 January 1494 Florence, Italy (buried in the church of Santa Maria Novella) |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Field | Painter |
| Movement | Italian Renaissance |
| Works | Paintings in: Church of Ognissanti, Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Trinita, Tornabuoni Chapel in Florence and Sistine Chapel, Rome |
Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449—11 January 1494) was an Italian Renaissance painter from Florence. Among his many apprentices was Michelangelo.
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Ghirlandaio's full name is given as Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi; it appears, therefore, that his father's surname was Curradi and his grandfather's Bigordi. Domenico, the eldest of eight children, was at first apprenticed to a jeweller or a goldsmith, most likely his own father. The nickname "Il Ghirlandaio" (garland-maker) came to Domenico from his father, a goldsmith who was famed for creating the metallic garland-like necklaces worn by Florentine women. In his father's shop, Domenico is said to have made portraits of the passers-by, and he was eventually apprenticed to Alessio Baldovinetti to study painting and mosaic.
In 1480, Ghirlandaio painted the Saint Jerome in His Study and other frescoes in the Church of Ognissanti, Florence, and a life-sized Last Supper in its refectory. From 1481 to 1485, he was employed on frescoes in the Sala dell Orologio of the Palazzo Vecchio. He also painted the Apotheosis of St. Zenobius, an over-life-sized work with an elaborate architectural framework, figures of Roman heroes, and other secular details, striking in its perspective and structural/compositional skill.
In 1483, Ghirlandaio was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV to paint a wall fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Christ calling Peter and Andrew to their Apostleship. Although he is known to have created other works in Rome, they have been for centuries considered lost to history. He also produced frescoes, dated before 1485, for Cappella di Santa Fina, in the Tuscan Collegiata di San Gimignano which came under the rule of nearby Siena at the beginning of the 1350s. His future brother-in-law, Sebastiano Mainardi, assisted him with these commissions in Rome and in San Gimignano.
Back in Florence in 1485, Ghirlandaio painted fresco cycles in the Sassetti chapel of Santa Trinita for the donor and banker Francesco Sassetti, the powerful manager of the branch of the Medici bank in Genoa, a position subsequently filled by Giovanni Tornabuoni—Ghirlandaio's future patron. In the chapel, Ghirlandaio painted six scenes from the life of Saint Francis, including Saint Francis obtaining from Pope Honorius the Approval of the Rules of His Order, Death and Obsequies and Resuscitation, by the interposition of the beatified saint, a child of the Spini family, who died as a result of a fall from a window. The first work depicts a portrait of Lorenzo de Medici, and the third, the painter's own likeness, which he also included in one of his pictures in the Santa Maria Novella as well as in the Adoration of the Magi in the Ospedale degli Innocenti orphanage. The altarpiece from the Sassetti chapel, the Adoration of the Shepherds, is now in the Florentine Academy.
Immediately after this commission, Ghirlandaio was asked to renew the frescoes in the choir of Santa Maria Novella, which formed the chapel of the Ricci family, but the Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families, which were much more prominent than the Ricci, undertook the cost of the restoration, with conditions—the question of preserving the arms of the Ricci gave rise to what some historians described as amusing litigation. The Tornabuoni Chapel frescoes, by Ghirlandaio and many assistants, were painted in four courses along the three walls, the main subjects being the lives of the Madonna and St. John the Baptist. These works are particularly interesting in that they include many historical portraits, a genre in which Ghirlandaio was preeminently skilled.
In this cycle, there are no fewer than twenty-one portraits of the Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families–in the Angel appearing to Zacharias, portraits of Politian, Marsilio Ficino and others; in the Salutation of Anna and Elizabeth, the beautiful Giovanna Tornabuoni (identified (incorrectly) by Giorgio Vasari as Ginevra de Benci); in the Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, (Sebastiano) Mainardi and Baldovinetti (some art historians have surmised that the latter figure may be the likeness of Ghirlandaio's father). The Ricci chapel was completed in 1490; the altarpiece was probably executed with the assistance of Domenico's brothers, Davide and Benedetto; the painted window was from Domenico's own design.
Other distinguished works from Ghirlandaio's hand are an altarpiece in tempera of the Virgin Adored by Saints Zenobius, Justus and Others, painted for the church of Saint Justus, and considered a remarkable masterpiece—in modern times it has been in the Uffizi gallery. Christ in Glory with Romuald and Other Saints, in the Badia of Volterra; what may be considered his finest panel-picture, the Adoration of the Magi (1488), in the previously-mentioned Church of the Innocenti, and the Visitation (Louvre) which bears the last ascertained date (1491) of all his works. Ghirlandaio did not often attempt the nude—one of his pictures including nudes, Vulcan and His Assistants Forging Thunderbolts, was painted for Lorenzo II de' Medici, but, as in the case of several others specified by Vasari, no longer exists. The mosaics that he produced date before 1491—one, of special note, is the Annunciation, on a portal of the cathedral of Florence.
Ghirlandaio's compositional schema were simultaneously grand and decorous, in keeping with 15th century's restrained and classicizing experimentation. His chiaroscuro, in the sense of realistic shading and three-dimensionalism, was reasonably advanced, as were his perspectives, which he designed on a very elaborate scale by eye alone, without the use of sophisticated mathematics. His color is more open to criticism, but such evaluation applies less to the frescoes than the tempera paintings, which are sometimes too broadly and crudely bright. His frescoes were executed entirely in buon fresco which, in Italian art terminology, refers to abstention from additions in tempera.
A certain hardness of outline may attest to his early training in metal work. Vasari states that Ghirlandaio was the first to abandon, in great part, the use of gilding in his pictures, representing by genuine painting any objects supposed to be gilded; yet this claim is not applicable to his entire oeuvre, since the landscape highlights in, as an example, the Adoration of the Shepherds located, in modern age, at the Florence Academy, were rendered in gold leaf. Those of his drawings and sketches which can be observed and studied at the Uffizi gallery, are considered particularly remarkable for their naturalistic vigor of outline.
One of the great legacies of Ghirlandaio is that he is commonly credited with having given some early art education to Michelangelo, who cannot, however, have remained with him long. Francesco Granacci is another among his best-known pupils.
Ghirlandaio died of "pestilential fever" and was buried in Santa Maria Novella. The day and month of his birth remain undocumented, but since he died in early January of his forty-fifth year, he most likely did not reach that birthday. He had been twice married and left six children. One of his three sons, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, also became a noted painter. Although he had a long line of descendants, the family died out in the 17th century, when its last members entered monasteries.
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