A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

With it we take leave of Florentine furniture painting, an art too unpretentious to be considered at length in a general survey, yet too charming in itself and too representative of the heyday of Florentine wealth and gayety to be wholly neglected.

Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio mark in very different fashions the culmination and the close of the Early Renaissance in Florence. Botticelli is the poet of its nostalgia. He expresses not its joyous average, but the erotic and mystical subtilities of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy, and later the Apocalyptic hopes and despairs that gathered around Savonarola. He utters a discontent and ideality which in part are completely contained in his work and in part were only fulfilled in the rapidly approaching Golden Age. He is aristocratic and individual, hence we shall consider him in connection with his fellow intellectuel, Leonardo da Vinci. Domenico Ghirlandaio,[^[45]] on the contrary, is the most completely contented creature, imaginable. He never even dreamt of anything desirable beyond his Florence. He loved the local spectacle too dearly to represent it literally. He generally prettified it, more rarely he glorified it. Its mundane ideals were his. Towards its people, its young men and maidens and grave merchants and magistrates he brought, without Fra Filippo Lippi’s sensitiveness, an equal curiosity and admiration. And Florence fairly deserved the adoration of such a man as was he. Wisely and generously ruled by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who exemplified not merely the practical virtues of the city but also her more engaging vices, author of wise policy and of wittily dissolute songs; combining the self-respecting appearances of liberty with the advantages of benevolent despotism, abounding in new wealth, lavish in pleasure and spectacle, unrestrained by a religion which was becoming merely a social decency and a form of fire-insurance against a not impossible hell—Florence had reached a pitch of complacency and worldly well-being the like of which the world has perhaps never seen before or since. The menacing sword of the spirit was already swaying over it in the eloquence of a young Dominican monk at Ferrara. But Florence trod the primrose path unconscious of the doom at hand for her. And Ghirlandaio was present to immortalize everything that was pleasant in her short prime.

Fig. 121. Domenico Ghirlandaio. St. Jerome. Fresco.—Ognissanti.

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.

Fig. 122. Ghirlandaio. The Last Supper. Fresco.—Refectory, Ognissanti.

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.