Chapter XVII: Ghirlandajo

(Pronounced Geer-lan-da'yo)
_Florentine School_
1449-1494
_Pupil of Fra Bartolommeo_

It is a good deal of a name--Domenico di Tommaso di Currado Bigordi--and it would appear that the child who bore it was under obligation to become a good deal of a something before he died.

Italian and Spanish painters generally had large names to live up to, and the one known as Ghirlandajo did nobly.

His father was a goldsmith and a popular part of his work was the making of golden garlands for the hair of rich Italian ladies. His work was so beautiful that it gained for him the name of Ghirlandajo, meaning the garland-twiner, a name that lived after him, in the great art of his son. Domenico began as a worker in mosaic, a maker of pictures or designs with many coloured pieces of glass or stone.

Ghirlandajo's art was no improvement on that of his teacher, but he in turn became the teacher of Michael Angelo.

The Florentine school of painting, to which Ghirlandajo belonged, was not so famous for colour as the Venetian school, but it had many other elements to commend it. One cannot expect Ghirlandajo to rank with Titian, Rubens, or other "colourists" of his own and later periods, but he did the very best work of his day and school. He attained to fame through his choice of types of faces for his models, and by his excellent grouping of figures.

Until his day, the faces introduced into paintings were likely to be unattractive, but he chose pleasing ones, and he painted the folds of garments beautifully. He was not entirely original in his ideas, but he carried out those which others had thus far failed to make interesting.

Often, in his wish to paint exactly what he saw, he softened nothing and therefore his figures were repulsive, but Fra Bartolommeo's pupil gave promise of what Michael Angelo was to fulfill.

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.

Ghirlandajo painted other than religious subjects, and one of them, at least, is quite repulsive. It is the picture of an old man, with a beautiful little child embracing him. The old man may have tenderness and love in his face, but his heavy features, his warty nose, do not make one think of pleasant things and one does not care to imagine the dear little child kissing the grotesque old fellow.

It was before Ghirlandajo's time that another painter had discovered the use of oil in mixing paints. Previously colours had been mixed in water with some gelatinous substance, such as the white and yolk of an egg, to give the paint a proper texture or consistency. This preparation was called "distemper," and frescoes were made by using this upon plaster while it was still wet. Plaster and colours dried together, and the painting became a part of the wall, not to be removed except by taking the plaster with it.

The different gluey substances used had often the effect of making the colours lose their tone and they presented a glazed surface when used upon wood, a favourite material with artists.

There are numberless anecdotes written of this artist and his brother, and one of these shows he had a temper. The brothers were engaged in a monastery at Passignano painting a picture of the "Last Supper." While at work upon it, they lived in the house. The coarse fare did not suit Ghirlandajo, and one night he could endure it no longer. Springing from his seat in the refectory he flung the soup all over the monk who had served it, and taking a great loaf of bread he beat him with it so hard that the poor monk was carried to his cell, nearly dead. The abbot had gone to bed, but hearing the rumpus he thought it was nothing less than the roof falling in, and he hurried to the room where he found the brothers still raging over their dinner. David shouted out to him, when the abbot tried to reprove the artist, that his brother was worth more than any "pig of an abbot who ever lived!"

It is recorded in the documents found in the Confraternity of St. Paul that:

Domenico de Ghurrado Bighordi, painter, called del Grillandaio, died on Saturday morning, on the 11th day of January, 1493 (o.s.), of a pestilential fever, and the overseers allowed no one to see the dead man, and would not have him buried by day. So he was buried, in Santa Maria Novella, on Saturday night after sunset, and may God forgive him! This was a very great loss for he was highly esteemed for his many qualities, and is universally lamented.

The artist left nine children behind him.

Ghirlandajo's pictures may be found in the Louvre, the Berlin Museum, the Dresden, Munich, and London galleries. Most children will find it hard to see their beauty.

Great men are likely to come in groups, and with Ghirlandajo there are associated Botticelli and Fra Filippo Lippi.

PLATE--PORTRAIT OF GIOVANNA DEGLI ALBIZI

This lovely lady was the wife of one of the painter's patrons, Giovanni Tornabuoni, through whom he received the commission for a series of frescoes in the choir of the Santa Maria Novella, Florence. The subjects chosen were sacred, but since Ghirlandajo, no more than his neighbours, knew what the Virgin or her contemporaries looked like, he saw no reason why he should not compliment some of the great ones of his own city and his own time by painting them in to represent the different characters of Holy Writ. So, as one of the ladies attendant upon Elizabeth when Mary comes to visit her, we have this signora of the fifteenth century. The artist made another picture of her, the one here shown, but in the same dress and posed the same as she had been for the church fresco. This accounts for its dignity and simplicity. It would seem like a bas-relief cut out of marble were it not for its wonderful colouring. It is in the Rudolf Kann Collection, Paris. This artist's other pictures are "Adoration of the Shepherds," "Adoration of the Magi," "Madonna and Child with Saints," "Three Saints and God the Father," "Coronation of the Virgin," and "Portrait of Old Man and Boy."