The benign influence of Fra Angelico passed down to Alesso Baldovinetti and Cosimo Roselli, and through Alesso to one of the major painters of the Renaissance—Domenico Ghirlandaio. Domenico’s father was a goldsmith who had received the nickname of Ghirlandaio from the gold and silver garlands that he had fashioned for the pretty heads of Florence. Under this father and Baldovinetti Domenico studied with zest and zeal; spent many hours before the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine; learned by indefatigable practice the arts of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and composition; “he would draw everyone who passed the shop,” says Vasari, “making extraordinary likenesses” after a fleeting view. He was barely twenty-one when he was charged to paint the story of Santa Fina in her chapel in the cathedral at San Gimignano. At thirty-one (1480) he earned the title of master by four frescoes in the church and refectory of the Ognissanti in Florence—a St. Jerome, a Descent From the Cross, a Madonna della Misericordia (which included a portrait of the donor, Amerigo Vespucci), and a Last Supper that gave some hints to Leonardo.
Summoned to Rome by Sixtus IV, he painted in the Sistine Chapel Christ Calling Peter and Andrew from Their Nets— especially beautiful in its background of mountains, sea, and sky. During this stay in Rome he studied and drew the arches, baths, columns, aqueducts, and amphitheaters of the ancient city, and with so practiced an eye that he was able to seize at once, without rule or compass, the just proportions of each part. A Florentine merchant in Rome, Francesco Tornabuoni, mourning his dead wife, employed Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes for her memorial in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and Domenico succeeded so well that Tornabuoni sent him back to Florence armed with florins and a letter attesting his excellence. The Signory soon entrusted to him the decoration of the Sala del Orologio in their palace. In the next four years (1481–5) he painted scenes from the life of St. Francis in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinità. All the progress of the painter’s art, except the use of oil, was embodied in these frescoes: harmonious composition, accurate line, gradations of light, perspective fidelity, realistic portraiture (of Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, Palla Strozzi, Francesco Sassetti), and at the same time the Angelesque tradition of ideality and piety. From the near-perfection of the altarpiece—the Adoration of the Shepherds—there would be but a step of deeper imagination and subtler grace to Leonardo and Raphael.
In 1485 Giovanni Tornabuoni, chief of the Medici bank in Rome, offered Ghirlandaio twelve hundred ducats ($30,000) to paint a chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and promised him two hundred more if the work should prove fully satisfactory. Aided by several pupils, including Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio gave most of the following five years to this high moment of his career. On the ceiling he painted the four Evangelists; on the walls St. Francis, Peter Martyr, John the Baptist, and scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ, from an Annunciation to a magnificent Coronation of the Virgin. Here again he delighted in contemporary portraits: the stately Lodovica Tornabuoni, fit to be a queen, the saucy beauty of Ginevra de’ Benci, the scholars Ficino, Politian, and Landino, the painters Baldovinetti, Mainardi, and Ghirlandaio himself. When, in 1490, the chapel was opened to the public, all the dignitaries and literati of Florence flocked to examine the paintings; the realistic portraits were the talk of the town; and Tornabuoni expressed himself as completely satisfied. Financially pressed at the time, he begged Domenico to forgive him the extra two hundred ducats; the artist replied that the satisfaction of his patron was more precious to him than any gold.
He was a lovable character, so adored by his brothers that one of them, David, almost slew an abbot with an aged loaf of bread for bringing to Domenico and his aides food that David held unworthy of his brother’s genius. Ghirlandaio opened his studio to all who cared to work or study there, making it a veritable school of art. He accepted all commissions, great or small, saying that none should be denied; he left the care of his household and finances to David, saying that he would not be content till he had painted the whole circuit of Florence’s wall. He produced many mediocre paintings, and yet some incidental pieces of great charm, like the Louvre’s delightful Grandfather with the bulbous nose, and the lovely Portrait of a Woman in the Morgan Collection in New York—pictures full of the character that year by year records itself upon the human face. Great critics of unquestionable learning and repute yield him only a minor rank;30 and it is true that he excelled rather in line than in color, that he painted too rapidly, and crowded his pictures with irrelevant detail, and took a step backward, perhaps, in preferring tempera after Baldovinetti’s experiments with oil. Even so, he brought the accumulated technology of his art to the highest point that it would reach in his country and his century; and he bequeathed to Florence and the world such treasures that criticism hangs its head in gratitude.
2. Botticelli
Only one Florentine surpassed him in his generation. Sandro Botticelli was as different from Ghirlandaio as ethereal fancy from physical fact. Alessandro’s father, Mariano Filipepi, unable to persuade the boy that life would be impossible without reading, writing, and arithmetic, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticelli, whose name, through the affection of the pupil or the whim of history, became permanently attached to Sandro’s own. From this bottega the lad passed at sixteen to that of Fra Filippo Lippi, who came to love the restless and impetuous youth. Filippo’s Filippino later painted Sandro as a sullen fellow with deep-set eyes, salient nose, sensual fleshy mouth, flowing locks, purple cap, red mantle, and green hose;31 who would have guessed such a man from the delicate fantasies that Botticelli has left to the museums? Perhaps every artist must be a sensualist before he can paint ideally; he must know and love the body as the ultimate source and standard of the esthetic sense. Vasari describes Sandro as “a merry fellow,” who played pranks upon fellow artists and obtuse citizens. Doubtless, like all of us, he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world.
About 1465 Botticelli set up his own studio, and soon received commissions from the Medici. It was apparently for Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, that he painted Judith; and for Piero Gottoso, her husband, he made his Madonna of the Magnificat and his Adoration of the Magi-hymns in color to three Medici generations. In the Madonna Botticelli pictured Lorenzo and Giuliano as boys of sixteen and twelve, holding a book upon which the Virgin—borrowed from Fra Lippo—writes her noble song of praise; in the Adoration Cosimo kneels at Mary’s feet, Piero kneels at a lower level before them, and Lorenzo, now seventeen, holds a sword in his hand as a sign that he has reached the age of legitimate killing.