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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. Many apprentices passed through Ghirlandaio's workshop, including Michelangelo. |
His particular talent lay in his ability to posit depictions of contemporary life and portraits of contemporary people within the context of religious narratives, bringing him great popularity and many large commissions. |
Life and works |
Early years |
Ghirlandaio was born Domenico di Tommaso di Currado di Doffo Bigordi. He was the eldest of six children born to Tommaso Bigordi by his first wife Antonia di ser Paolo Paoli; of these, only Domenico and his brothers and collaborators Davide and Benedetto Ghirlandaio survived childhood. Tommaso had two more children by his second wife, also named Antonia, whom he married in 1464. Domenico's half-sister Alessandra (b. 1475) married the painter Bastiano Mainardi in 1494. 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 was eventually apprenticed to Alesso Baldovinetti to study painting and mosaic. According to the art historian Günter Passavent, he was apprenticed in Florence to Andrea del Verrocchio. He maintained a close association with other Florentine painters including Botticelli and with the Umbrian painter Perugino. |
First works in Florence, Rome, and Tuscany |
Ghirlandaio excelled in the painting of frescos and it is for his fresco cycles that he is best known. An early commission came to him in the 1470s from the Commune of San Gimignano to decorate the Chapel of Santa Fina in the Collegiate Church of that city. The frescos, executed from 1477 to 1478, depict two miraculous events associated with the death of Saint Fina. |
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. |
In 1481, Ghirlandaio was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV as one of a team of Florentine and Umbrian painters who he commissioned to create a series of frescos depicting popes and scenes from the Old and New Testaments on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. 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 the individual 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. The first of these paintings contains portraits of Lorenzo de' Medici, Sassetti and Lorenzo's children with their tutor, Agnolo Poliziano. The Resuscitation shows the painter's own likeness. |
In 1483, there arrived in Florence a masterpiece of the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes. Now known as the Portinari Altarpiece, it was an Adoration of the Shepherds, commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, an employee of the Medici Bank. The painting was in oil paint, not the tempera employed in Florence, and demonstrated the flexibility of that medium in the painting of textures and intensity of light and shade. The aspect of the painting that had a profound effect on Ghirlandaio was the naturalism with which the shepherds were depicted. |
Ghirlandaio painted the altarpiece of the Sassetti chapel, an Adoration of the Shepherds, in 1485. It is in this painting that he particularly shows his indebtedness to the Portinari Altarpiece. The shepherds, among whom is a self-portrait of the artist, are portrayed with a realism that was an advance in Florentine painting at that time. The altarpiece is still in position in Santa Trinita, surrounded by the six frescoes depicting the Life of St. Francis of which it became the centrepiece. On either side are portraits of the kneeling donors, and although the figures are in fresco on the wall, they occupy the same position and relationship to the central scene of the Adoration that the donors do on the outer panels of the Portinari triptych. |
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. |
In this cycle, there are no fewer than twenty-one portraits of the Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families. In the Angel appearing to Zacharias, there are portraits of members of the Medici Academy: Agnolo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino and others. The Tornabuoni Chapel was completed in 1490 with the altarpiece probably executed with the assistance of Domenico's brothers, Davide and Benedetto; and a stained glass window to Ghirlandaio's own design. Domenico painted an altarpiece for Giovanni Tornabuoni to commemorate his first wife who had died in childbirth, as had Giovanni's mother. The Virgin with the Two Marys is now in the Louvre. It is the only time that the two Marys are seen without Mary Magdalen. They usually are depicted together as the Three Marys. However, Mary Magdalene was never pregnant so was not a fitting subject for this altarpiece. |
Although mainly known for his fresco cycles Ghirlandaio painted a number of altarpieces including the Virgin Adored by Saints Zenobius, Justus and Others, painted for the church of Saint Justus, now in the Uffizi Gallery and the Adoration of the Magi in the Florentine orphanage, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, in which he included a self-portrait. Other panel paintings include Christ in Glory with Romuald and Other Saints, in the Badia of Volterra and the Visitation now in the Louvre, which bears the last ascertained date (1491) of all his works. Ghirlandaio painted a number of panel portraits of known identities, such as his profile portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, commissioned in 1488. Perhaps his best known is the Portrait of an Old Man and his Grandson, remarkable for both the tenderness of expression and the realism with which the disfigured nose (rhinophyma) of the old man is depicted. |
According to Vasari, Ghirlandaio also painted several scenes of Classical subjects with nude figures, including a Vulcan and his Assistants forging Thunderbolts, for Lorenzo II de' Medici, but which no longer exists. He also produced designs for a number of mosaics including the Annunciation, on a portal of the Florence Cathedral. |
Death |
Ghirlandaio died on 11 January 1494 of "pestilential fever" and was buried in Santa Maria Novella. 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. |
Critical assessment and legacy |
Ghirlandaio worked mainly in fresco, with a number of important works being executed in tempera. Vasari states that Ghirlandaio was the first to abandon, in great part, the use of gilding in his pictures, representing by painting any objects that were made of gold. This is not applicable to his entire oeuvre, as details in some paintings, for example, the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds (now in Florence Academy) were rendered in gold leaf. |
According to William Michael Rossetti, "[Ghirlandaio's] scheme of composition is grand and decorous; his chiaroscuro excellent, and especially his perspectives, which he would design on a very elaborate scale by the eye alone; his colour is more open to criticism, but this remark applies much less to the frescoes than the tempera-pictures, which are sometimes too broadly and crudely bright." According to Vasari, his sense of perspective was so acute that he made drawings of ancient Roman monuments such as the Colisseum in which he worked entirely by eye, that later proved to have mathematically accurate proportion and linear perspective when measured. |
Ghirlandaio is credited as the teacher of Michelangelo. Francesco Granacci is another among his pupils. According to Vasari, these two were sent by Ghirlandaio to the Medici Academy, when Lorenzo de' Medici requested his two best pupils. Although Michelangelo regarded himself as primarily a sculptor, in the sixteenth century he was to follow his master as a painter of frescos, at the Sistine Chapel. |
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. By the late nineteenth century the appreciation of his work had waned and it was not until 1994, the five-hundredth anniversary of the artist's death, that interest in him was rekindled. At this time a symposium was held and subsequently in-depth monographs on the artist were published. Rosenauer comments on the usefulness of Ghirlandaio's paintings as pictorial records for the historian. |
Works by Ghirlandaio |
Portraits |
Altarpieces |
Frescos |
Details |
See also |
Davide Ghirlandaio |
Benedetto Ghirlandaio |
Ridolfo Ghirlandaio |
Notes |
References |
Sources |
Chastel, André (1983). Art of the Italian Renaissance. UK: Alpine Fine Arts Collection. ISBN 0-88168-139-3. |
External links |
Media related to Domenico Ghirlandaio at Wikimedia Commons |
Paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio with details about each |
ghirlandaio.it, Museums and exhibitions in Florence |
Web Gallery of Art |
Ghirlandaio in Panopticon Virtual Art Gallery |
Ghirlandaio's Cappella Sassetti Frescoes |
Where to find Ghirlandaio's works in Florence |
Ghirlandaio and Renaissance Florence exhibition |
Italian Paintings: Florentine School, a collection catalog containing information about the artist and his works (see pages: 128–137). |
Domenico Ghirlandaio at the National Gallery of Art |
Carl Brandon Strehlke, "The Man of Sorrows (Christ Crowned with Thorns) by Domenico Ghirlandaio (cat. 1176a)" in The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works, a Philadelphia Museum of Art free digital publication. |
Domenico Maggiotto or Domenico Fedeli (1713–1794) was an Italian painter and engraver who lived and worked mainly in Venice. He was one of the main pupils of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. His son Francesco Maggiotto was also a painter. |
References |
External links |
Italian Paintings, Venetian School, a collection catalog containing information about Maggiotto and his works (see index; plate 46). |
Domenico Morelli (4 August 1823 – 13 August 1901) was an Italian painter, who mainly produced historical and religious works. Morelli was immensely influential in the arts of the second half of the 19th century, both as director of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, but also because of his rebelliousness against institutions: traits that flourished into the passionate, often patriotic, Romantic and later Symbolist subjects of his canvases. Morelli was the teacher of Vincenzo Petrocelli, Ulisse Caputo, and Anselmo Gianfanti. |
Biography |
He was born to a poor family in Naples. His mother had hoped he would become a priest. His precocious talent was noted, and he was enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples in 1836–1846, where he befriended Francesco Altamura. His early works contain imagery drawn from the Medieval stories and Romantic poets such as Byron. In 1845, he painted a prize-winning L' angelo che porta le anime al Purgatorio dantesco. In 1845–46, with the painting of Saul calmato da David, and help from a generous patron, the lawyer Ruggiero, he won a fellowship to study in Rome. In 1847–48, he painted Il corsaio and Una sfida di Trovatori, the prize-winning Bacio del Corsaro, and Goffredo a cui appare l'angelo. In 1847 at Rome, he painted a Madonna che culla il bambino, aiutata da San Giovanni. |
Morelli had just returned to Naples, when the insurrections of 1848 erupted in Naples. He joined the protesters in the barricades on via Toledo, and was wounded, nearly killed, and briefly imprisoned. In a retrospective published after his death, Isabella Anderton would label Domenico as one of the warrior artists of Italy, a group which also included Filippo Palizzi, Telemaco Signorini, Stefano Ussi, and Francesco Saverio Altamura. |
Released, Morelli returned to Rome. He painted Van der Welt in mezzo ai corsari sopra una via romita (1851) and Cesare Borgia a Capita in mezzo ad una folla di fanciulle. In 1855 at the Florentine Exposition, he displayed his famous The Iconoclasts. |
He participated in the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. Later, in Florence, he was an active participant in the Macchiaioli discussions on Realism. Morelli claimed that it was these discussions that made his own work less academic and helped him to develop a freer style and to experiment with color. In this period, he is grouped into the school of Realism. |
In 1857, he won a contest to design the decoration of the Church of San Francesco of Gaeta, a project never completed. On a trip to Milan he painted Count di Ijara, Pompeian Bath, and a Madonna Addolorata. By 1857, he had returned to Naples, painting a Torquato Tasso. For the ceiling of the Royal chapel of Naples, he painted an Assumption of the Virgin. |
He was a member of an independent society, led by his friend Filippo Palizzi, to promote the liberal arts, called the Societa Promotrice in 1862. He was appointed consultant for new acquisitions of the Capodimonte art museum in Naples and, thus, had significant impact on the subsequent direction of the collections. In 1868, Morelli became a professor of painting at his old Academy, which now became the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Naples. From that period onward, his interest turned to religious and mystical themes, drawn from mostly Christian, but also Jewish and Muslim traditions. Perhaps best known from this period is the Assumption on the ceiling of the Royal Palace in Naples. Morelli was also one of the collaborators for the illustrations of the Amsterdam Bible in 1895. From 1899 until his death, he was president of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. |
Morelli late in life won many awards and distinctions. he was named honorary professor of the principal academies of Italy and Europe, commendatore of the Order of SS. Maurizio e Lazzaro and of the Order of the Crown of Italy, and cavaliere dell' Ordine civile di Savoia. In June, 1886, he was knighted a senator by the King. |
He died on 13 August 1901 in Naples. |
Among his many pupils were Giuseppe Costa, Francesco Paolo Michetti, Vittorio Matteo Corcos, Giuseppe Boschetto, Camillo Miola, Edoardo Tofano, Antonio Mancini, Vincenzo Montefusco and Enrico Salfi. Morelli designed the frescoes painted for the tomb of Giacomo Leopardi, located in the church of San Vitale at Fuorigrotta, but they were completed posthumously by his son-in-law, Paolo Vetri. |
Gallery |
References |
Sources |
Willard, Ashton Rollins (1895). A sketch of the life and work of the painter Domenico Morelli. Cambridge, MA, USA: The Riverside Press, Houghton, Mifflin, and Company. |
External links |
Media related to Domenico Morelli (painter) at Wikimedia Commons |
Domenico Robusti, also known as Domenico Tintoretto, (1560 – 17 May 1635) was an Italian painter from Venice. He grew up under the tutelage of his father, the renowned painter Jacopo Tintoretto. |
Life |
Apprenticeship |
Domenico was born in Venice. At age 17, he became a member of the Venetian painter's guild and, to further his training, worked alongside his father executing paintings in the Doge's Palace in Venice. Domenico then began to work independently in the palace, focusing his work on historical themes, including complex arrangements of multiple figures in battle scenes. But throughout his life, Domenico also painted several religious commissions. Some of his celebrated altarpieces include St. George Killing the Dragon in San Giorgio Maggiore, the Translation of the Body of St. Mark to Venice in the Scuola Grande di San Marco, An Apparition of St. Mark in St Mark's Basilica, and altarpieces in Modena and Rimini. Of further note are Domenico's murals in the Doge's Palace and the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, and the Plague of Venice in San Francesco della Vigna. |
Portraiture |
It is argued that Domenico's greatest contribution to the history of painting resides in his portraiture. Domenico painted Margaret of Austria who became Queen of Spain through her marriage to Philip III. Other commissioned portraits include the Duchess Margarita, the widow of Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara, the Doge Pasquale Cicogna, Doge Marino Grimani, Marcantonio Memmo, Giovanni Bembo, Luigi d'Este, the Count d’Aron and Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. According to Carlo Ridolfi and the evidence of surviving portraits such as that of Sir John Finet, future Master of Ceremonies to Charles I he painted many English visitors to Venice, including the Collector Earl of Arundel and his wife and children. |
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