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| Author's biography |
| Ghirlandaio (also spelled Ghirlandaio, original name Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi) was an early Renaissance painter of the Florentine school noted for his detailed narrative frescoes, which include many portraits of leading citizens in contemporary dress.Domenico was the son of a goldsmith, and his nickname "Ghirlandaio" was derived from his father's skill in making garlands. Domenico probably began as an apprentice in his father's shop, but almost nothing is known about his training as a painter or the beginnings of his career. The earliest works attributed to him, dating from the early 1470s, show strong influence from the frescoes of Andrea del Castagno, who died when Ghirlandaio was about eight years old. Giorgio Vasari, the biographer of Renaissance artists, recorded in his Lives (1550) that Ghirlandaio was a pupil of the Florentine painter Alesso Baldovinetti, but Baldovinetti was only four or five years older than Ghirlandaio himself. He worked in fresco on large wall surfaces in preference to smaller scale paintings executed on wood panels, although he used them for the altarpieces that were the centrepieces of the fresco cycles in his major undertakings. He never experimented with oil painting, although most Florentine painters of his generation began to use it exclusively in the last quarter of the 15th century.The village church of Cercina, near Florence, has a fresco of three saints, now thought to be Ghirlandaio's earliest work, but there is general agreement that some frescoes in the church of Ognissanti in Florence, almost certainly dating from around 1472-73, show his style at its earliest developed stage. One of them represents the Pietà and depicts several members of the Vespucci family as mourners, thus already introducing Ghirlandaio's characteristic combination of portrait figures in contemporary dress with a specifically religious subject. Something of the passion for minute detail shown by the early Flemish painters can be found in Ghirlandaio's work at this period; his fresco "St. Jerome in His Study," also in Ognissanti and dated 1480, may even be an enlarged version in fresco of an oil painting by the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, which had found its way to Florence. The St. Jerome fresco is particularly important because it is a companion piece to one of St Augustine by Ghirlandaio's Florentine contemporary Sandro Botticelli; the difference between the two frescoes reveals Ghirlandaio's rather pedestrian and anecdotal style.Ghirlandaio's first major commissioned works were the two frescoes depicting scenes from the life of St Fina, painted in 1475 in the Chapel of Santa Fina in the Collegiata at San Gimignano, near Florence. Both works derive from Fra Filippo Lippi's slightly earlier fresco cycle in the cathedral at Prato and contain a number of portrait heads arranged, rather stiffly, in the symmetrical type of composition that was to become increasingly identified with Ghirlandaio. Even then he was already employing assistants; in his later works he clearly could only complete large commissions in the comparatively short time allotted by the extensive use of highly trained assistants working simultaneously on different parts of the frescoes.In 1481-82 Ghirlandaio received an important commission in the Vatican for a fresco, nominally representing the calling of the first Apostles, Peter and Andrew, in the "../../../../tours/sistina/indexl" tppabs="http://www.wga.hu/tours/sistina/indexl" TARGET="_top">Sistine Chapel. Its style is reminiscent of the frescoes by Masaccio of about 1427, which had been the great innovating works of the early 15th century in Florence but by then must have seemed somewhat old-fashioned. The principal feature of this fresco is the group of portraits of the Florentine colony in Rome, who are represented as witnesses of the biblical event. It has been suggested that the inclusion of these Florentines in a fresco painted for the Vatican had political signific |
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