Ghirlandajo and Michael Angelo were a good deal alike in their emotional natures. Both sought great spaces in which to paint, and both chose to paint great frescoes. Indeed Ghirlandajo had the extraordinary ambition to put frescoes on all the fortification walls about Florence. It certainly would have made the city a great picture gallery to have had its walls forever hung with the pictures of one master. Had he painted them, inside and out, when such an enemy as Napoleon came along, with his love of art, and his fashion of taking all that he saw to Paris, he would likely enough have camped outside the walls while he decided what part of the gallery he would transfer to the Louvre.
One of the reasons that Ghirlandajo is famous is that he often chose well known personages for his models, and as he painted just what he saw, did not idealise his subject, he gave to the world amazing portraits, as well as fine paintings. The same thing was done by painters of a far different school, at another period. The Dutch and Flemish painters were in the habit of using their neighbours as models.
Ghirlandajo is classed among religious painters, but let us compare some of his "religious" paintings with those of Raphael or Murillo, and see the result.
He painted seven frescos on the walls of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence, all scenes of Biblical history, as Ghirlandajo imagined them. They show him to have been a fine artist, but to have had not much idea of history, and to have had little sense of fitness.
Ghirlandajo's seven subjects are taken from legends of the Virgin, and the greatest represents Mary's visit to Elizabeth; it is called "The Visitation," and it is a fresco about eighteen feet long painted on the choir wall.
Let us imagine the possible scene. The Virgin Mary came from Cana, a little town in Galilee placed in the hills about nine miles from Nazareth, the home of the lowliest and the poorest, of a kindly pastoral people living in the open air, needing and wanting very little, simple in their habits. Elizabeth, Mary's old cousin, lived in Judea, and St. Luke writes thus: "Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Judea; and entered into the house of Zacharias" (Elizabeth's husband) "and saluted Elizabeth."
This record had been made at least eleven hundred years before Ghirlandajo painted in the Santa Maria Novella, and from it one cannot imagine that Mary made any preparation for her journey, nor does it suggest that Elizabeth had any chance to arrange a reception for her. Even had she done so, it must have been of the simplest description, at that time among those people. One can imagine a lowly home; an aged woman coming out to meet her young relative either at her door or in the high road.
There may have been surroundings of fruit and flowers, a stretch of highroad or a hospitable doorway; but the wildest imagination could not picture what Ghirlandajo did.
He paints Elizabeth flanked with handmaidens, as if she were some royal personage, instead of a priest's wife in fairly comfortable circumstances where comfort was easily obtained. Mary appears to be escorted by ladies-in-waiting, hardly a likely circumstance since she was affianced to no richer or more important person than a carpenter of Galilee. Possibly the three ladies that stand behind Mary in, the picture are merely lookers-on, but in that case the visit of Mary would seem to have been of public importance, especially as there are youths near by who are also much interested in one woman's hasty visit to another. The rich brocades worn by Elizabeth's waiting ladies are splendid indeed and the landscape is fine--a rich Italian landscape with architecture of the most up-to-date sort--showing, in short, that the artist lacked historical imagination. He found some models, made a purely decorative painting with an Italian setting and called it "The Visitation." The doorway on the right is distinctly renaissance.
Such a painting as this is not "religious," nor is it historic, nor does it suggest a subject; it is merely a fine picture better coloured than most of those of the Florentine school. There is another painting of this same subject by Ghirlandajo in the Louvre, but it is no nearer truth than the one in the Santa Maria.