Domenico Ghirlandaio

Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi (2 June 1448 – 11 January 1494), professionally known as Domenico Ghirlandaio (also spelt as Ghirlandajo), was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Florence. Ghirlandaio was part of the so-called "third generation" of the Florentine Renaissance, along with Verrocchio, the Pollaiolo brothers and Sandro Botticelli.

Ghirlandaio led a large and efficient workshop that included his brothers Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi from San Gimignano, and later his son Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. Both Ghirlandaio's father and his uncle, Antonio, were setaiuolo a minuto (dealers of silks and related objects in small quantities).

Giorgio Vasari reported that Domenico was at first apprenticed to his father, who was a goldsmith. The nickname "Il Ghirlandaio" (garland-maker) came to Domenico from his father, who was famed for creating the metallic garland-like headdresses worn by Florentine women. According to Vasari, Domenico made portraits of the passers-by and visitors to the shop: "when he painted the country people or anyone who passed through his studio he immediately captured their likeness". He maintained a close association with other Florentine painters including Botticelli and with the Umbrian painter Perugino.

In 1480, Ghirlandaio painted St. Jerome in His Study as a companion piece to Botticelli's Saint Augustine in His Study in the Church of Ognissanti, Florence. He also painted a life-sized Last Supper in its refectory. From 1481 to 1485, he was employed on frescoes at the Palazzo Vecchio, painting among other works an Apotheosis of St. Zenobius (1482) in the Sala del Giglio, an over-life-sized work with an elaborate architectural framework, figures of Roman heroes, and other secular details, striking in its perspective and compositional skill. Ghirlandaio painted the Vocation of the Apostles. He also painted the now lost Resurrection of Christ. The Crossing of the Red Sea has also been attributed to him, but is consistent with the style of Cosimo Roselli who was also part of the commission. Ghirlandaio is known to have created other works in Rome, now lost. His future brother-in-law, Sebastiano Mainardi, assisted him with these commissions and in the early frescoes at San Gimignano where Mainardi is now thought to have painted an Annunciation sometimes attributed to Ghirlandaio.

In 1484, an agent of Ludovico il Moro wrote to his lord, describing the works of artists whose works he had seen in Florence: "Domenico Ghirlandaio [is] a good painter on panel and better in mural fresco; his style is very good; he is active and very creative."

Later works in Tuscany

Between 1482 and 1485, Ghirlandaio painted a fresco cycle in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinita for the banker Francesco Sassetti, the powerful director of the Medici bank, whose Rome branch was headed by Giovanni Tornabuoni, Ghirlandaio's future patron. The cycle was of six scenes from the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, including Saint Francis obtaining from Pope Honorius the Approval of the Rules of His Order, the saint's Death and Obsequies and a Resuscitation of a child of the Spini family, who had died as a result of a fall from a window.

Immediately after the commission for the Sassetti Chapel, Ghirlandaio was asked to renew the frescoes in the choir of the Santa Maria Novella, which formed the chapel of the Ricci family. The Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families, who were much more prominent than the Ricci, undertook the cost of the restoration, with certain contractual conditions. The Tornabuoni Chapel frescoes were painted in four courses around the three walls between 1485 and 1490, the subjects being the lives of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist. The day and month of his birth remain undocumented, but he is recorded as having died in early January of his forty-fifth year. He had been married twice and left six children. One of his three sons, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, also became a painter. Although he had a long line of descendants, the family name died out in the seventeenth century, when its last members entered monasteries.

Ghirlandaio was highly praised by Vasari: "[Ghirlandaio] who, from his talent and from the greatness and the vast number of his works, may be called one of the most important and most excellent masters of the age..." In the nineteenth century Jacob Burckhardt and others praised him for his compositions, for his technical ability, and for the lifelike quality of his figures, seen by Archibald Joseph Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle as being as innovative as those of Giotto had been.

Works by Ghirlandaio

Portraits

Altarpieces

Frescos

Details