Ghirlandajo: Domenico Bigordi, called Ghirlandajo, or the garland-maker, celebrated painter, b. in Florence, 1449, d. 1494; “in treatment, drawing, and modelling, G. excels any fresco-painter since Masaccio; shares with the two Lippis, father and son, a fondness for introducing subordinate groups which was unknown to Massaccio.”—Woltmann and Woermann’s History of Painting.
24.
Their ghosts still stand, as I said before,
Watching each fresco flaked and rasped,
Blocked up, knocked out, or whitewashed o’er:
—No getting again what the Church has grasped!
The works on the wall must take their chance;
“Works never conceded to England’s thick clime!”
(I hope they prefer their inheritance
Of a bucketful of Italian quicklime.)
25.
When they go at length, with such a shaking
Of heads o’er the old delusion, sadly
Each master his way through the black streets taking,
Where many a lost work breathes though badly—
Why don’t they bethink them of who has merited?
Why not reveal, while their pictures dree
Such doom, how a captive might be out-ferreted?
Why is it they never remember me?
— St. 25. dree: endure (A. S. “dreo’gan”).
26.
Not that I expect the great Bigordi,
Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;
Nor the wronged Lippino; and not a word I
Say of a scrap of Fra Angelico’s:
But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,
To grant me a taste of your intonaco,
Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?
Not a churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?
— St. 26. Bigordi: Ghirlandajo; see above. {note to St. 23.} Sandro: Sandro Filipepi, called Botticelli (1437-1515), “belonged in feeling, to the older Christian school, tho’ his religious sentiment was not quite strong enough to resist entirely the paganizing influence of the time” (Heaton); became a disciple of Savonarola.
Lippino: Filippino Lippi, son of Fra Filippo (1460-1505), “added to his father’s bold naturalism a dramatic talent in composition, which places his works above the mere realisms of Fra Filippo, and renders him worthy to be placed next to Masaccio in the line of progress.”—Heaton.
Fra Angelico: see under the Monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi. Taddeo Gaddi: “foremost amongst these (‘The Giotteschi’) stands the name of T. G. (1300, living in 1366), the son of Gaddo Gaddi, and godson of Giotto; was an architect as well as painter, and was on the council of Works of S. Maria del Fiore, after Giotto’s death, and carried out his design for the bell-tower.”—Heaton. intonaco: rough-casting.
Lorenzo Monaco: see under the Monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi.
27.
Could not the ghost with the close red cap,
My Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman,
Save me a sample, give me the hap
Of a muscular Christ that shows the draughtsman?
No Virgin by him the somewhat petty,
Of finical touch and tempera crumbly—
Could not Alesso Baldovinetti
Contribute so much, I ask him humbly?