Fig. 126. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Old Man and Boy.—Paris.
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.
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER I
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.”