A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 123. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Miracle of the Spini Boy. Fresco.—Trinità.

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.

Fig. 124. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Adoration of the Magi.—Innocenti.

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.

Fig. 125. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Birth of St. John.—Santa Maria Novella.